Take Cover

This is a political post. While this style is very important to part of my voice, don’t feel like you have to read it. I am not sure I would want to.

In 2020, America took off its mask. It revealed what had always been resting beneath the projection of our civilization, looking for any slight excuse to spread its ugliness. And one-by-one, the lights began to go out.

I have never been troubled by belief in the invisible — and I like to think this is part of my pedigree as an electrical engineer. Over hundreds of credit hours, I have watched professors draw stick drawings on whiteboards in between grand declarations about what electrons are up to. Then, through a combination of experimentation and grading pressure, I was trained to believe, despite having gone my entire life without seeing a single one of these impossibly tiny particles with my own eyes. They are the repulsive edges of the atom that hum behind our screens, but also stop us from falling through faces as we kiss each other. In that, I know they are there.

When it came time to cover my face with a mask, it did not take a moment to convince me that this could have an impact. After all, the basis of my career is that the invisible can change the world so predictably that one can write contracts that rely on it. That a virus, much larger than an electron, could end our civilization, was easy to accept — as was the concept that something preventing its literal ejection might forestall that end. I sealed a cut of cloth to my nostrils and lips and never looked back.

But not everyone sees it this way. Some do not believe in the invisible. Some believe in the invisible, but do not believe its power. Some believe in the invisible, but think they may bargain with it. Some think that the mitigation does not work, and thus must be left untried in favor of comfort. And some think their beliefs are so real that it is only natural they be enforced with violence.

Outside Palo Alto and Los Angeles, people in general do not wear masks. This is everyone from the pickup truck drivers at rest stops, revving their engines to show just how much they want to prove, to the kindly men and women at the bike shops who helped me with air or energy bars. It is simply not socially acceptable to wear a mask in these places. And I somewhat understand why. If ever there was a place where some people wore masks and others did not, those who did would feel like suckers, watching the others go about their day without them. They may also attract looks of suspicion, or feel that they risk physical injury by provoking someone’s inferiority complex. Our social system is engineered for local compliance, and one way or another, it will produce it.

This is the worst part of it, at least for me. Before the pandemic there was no way to know who was who before you started to talk. Sure, there were stereotypes, but if I got into a conversation about the best way to grill a steak, or a recent home improvement project, I could suspend any feelings about politics and look for that common ground that really does bind all Americans together with a thousand hidden points of agreement. With masks, those conversations simply no longer happen. I identify myself as other and nobody stops to wonder what I may think or say, even if it would help us enjoy our lives.

While I was touring, the virus was much scarier for me. Were I to incubate it (with three vaccines in me, but immunosuppressed from exertion), I would be stuck with a bicycle in a hotel room, unable to continue my trip. I took many precautions, avoiding indoor dining, crowded spaces, and even trying to line up for takeout outside of the restaurant. This last point would always fail, with people cutting me in line so they could needlessly breathe each other’s air. And I understand, restaurants don’t want to enforce policies like this lest give the impression that they are busier than they are and frighten hungry customers away. That said, despite straining my muscles over hundreds of miles of California, these moments were the most frustrating of the trip.

But then I imagine this on the national scale: thousands of people like me, interactions like mine. One group relying on masks, and the other scorning them. This is the kind of doctrinal difference that really could drive a wedge between people, as the proof sits right on our face for all to see. It is a platform for dehumanization. In that sense, control of the virus is a domestic security concern: for all of us at our wits’ end, there rises the potential damage we could do.