You can’t defend Michael Flynn and honor those who died defending the freedoms he wants to take away

Today is the day set aside to consider the sacrifice of people through the years who gave their lives in the service of the military to protect the freedoms we enjoy as Americans. It’s a day some people confuse with Veteran’s Day, in which we honor those who served and are still with us.

One of those vetarans, former General Michael Flynn–a close ally of former President Donald Trump, who Trump pardoned–is on record as calling for the overthrow of the US Government, like in Myanmar.

Former General Michael Flynn, who told QAnon supporters we should have a military coup.

Flynn was appearing at a QAnon conference in Dallas and was asked whether a coup like in Myanmar could happen here. “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.”

In Myanmar’s elections earlier this year, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD party won a landslide victory. But opposition leaders claimed the victory was only possible because of widespread voter fraud and demanded a new election. Sound familiar?

After investigations showed no fraud, the coup occurred. Suu Kyi is being held in an undisclosed location, facing a number of political criminal charges. More than 800 Burmese have been killed since the coup, including 40 children. More than 125 thousand teachers and almost 20,000 university staff have been suspended from their jobs for opposing the coup.

The economy has cratered and unemployment and hunger have skyrocketed. The World Food Programme, an UN initiative, estimates that 3.4 million, about 6 percent of Myanmar’s population, will go hungry. Danny Fenster, a US journalist, was detained trying to leave the country and is now one of 4,000 journalists in custody.

These are the things General Flynn wants to happen.

His comments come just a couple of days after Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz said that Americans had an obligation to take up arms against technology companies and that the Second Amendment exists so Americans can take up armed rebellion against the government (though he hopes it never comes to that [wink, wink]).

There is no way to support General Flynn’s statement while honoring freedom. If Flynn’s vision were to be come reality, American citizens would actively oppose it. Odds are very good that the faction of the military that would carry out his vision would have to take up arms against protesting citizens. By definition of wanting a Myanmar-style coup, some of them would disappear into prisons for the crime of opposing the rightfully installed government.

People supporting such actions wouldn’t be defending our freedoms, they’d be taking them from us at the point of a gun. They’d be killing and imprisoning citizens who dared to exercise those freedoms.

If you support General Flynn and his anti-American, unAmerican sentiments, you have no place wrapping yourself in the flag and crying crocodile tears for the brave men and women who died defending us. They died defending the freedoms you would sell to a reality TV star in exchange for justifying your fears and your feelings of nostalgia.

When the people you’re allied with advocate a forceful overturn of an election, the destruction of the economy, and the imprisonment and death of any who dare disagree, it’s time to look hard at your positions and your allies.

And if you dismiss Flynn’s comments on the way to “honoring those who died,” don’t bother. Go buy yourself a couch. I heard there are sales to celebrate the holiday.

Why I’m not praying for healing.

At church today, we talked about the story at the beginning of Mark 3, where Jesus went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and noticed a man with a deformed hand. At the time, the religious viewed things like disease as a sign that you sinned and that God was somehow pissed off at you–and you were paying through His holy, holy wrath. Or something.

The view of God some have is surprisingly like Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi.

Jesus, of course, healed the guy, as Jesus does.

The upshot was that we could also ask for healing, because according to the letter to the Hebrews, Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If he healed then, he’d heal now. And then we were invited to come forward to ask for prayers to heal us or loved ones.

Having the Fibro, I could have come forward and asked for that healing. In 2015, when I had whatever I had then, I’d have been right in that line to get healed. Might’ve even thrown an elbow or two.

Theoretical 2015 me getting to the front of the line to be healed, if I felt up to it that day.

Today, I didn’t come forward.

God’s gonna do what God’s gonna do.

So far, I’ve been incredibly blessed and fortunate. I ran 11 miles on Thursday. Month to date, I’ve run or walked more than 166 miles. Many of my Fibro brothers and sisters have major sleep problems and major pain. My score on the four symptoms of pain, malaise, fatigue, and fog are down by almost 33% in the four months I’ve been tracking.

As people with the Fibro go, I’m doing okay. If God chooses to heal me, I won’t argue his holy wisdom. But if he doesn’t–or if it gets worse–then I’m in his hands the same as if he heals me.

I’m speaking only for myself here. What I’m about to say isn’t a trite, unfeeling thing to say to the people who are struggling with something that feels bigger than they can handle. Having been down this road (or similar) in 2015 and again this year, I wouldn’t do that.

I believe there’s a reason I have this condition.

My approach of screw this thing, I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do (and be smart about it) is the polar opposite of what I did in 2015. I’m more active. I’ve lost weight. And though I have horrible days, my mindset is like a bright sunny day, compared to the cave-like darkness of the first time.

Perhaps that’s what’s happening here. Perhaps I have this so people can see someone to take inspiration from it.

I’m not beating my chest here. I tend to be cynical and pessimistic (decade as a Jets fan, donchya know?). I’m more Eeyore than Pollyanna. This approach is new and surprising to me. It’s not something I brought to the table.

Decades of fandom have conditioned me to think positive: I’m positive they’ll suck this season.

But this feels like a time when I need to step forward in faith, to take a step into the void.

I could very well crash tomorrow. If that’s the path for me, so be it. One of Paul’s letters say that we live by faith and not my sight. Now I understand that a little better.

There are things I’ll ask for healing from–most of them based on what happens between the ears–but this isn’t one of them.

Better people than I do have the Fibro. If my being afflicted softens my heart to them and to others, then the Fibro I have is a small price to pay for that. And I’ll try to do what God wants.

Matt Gaetz is targeting social media companies because it hard to provoke a war when no one can hear you

If someone decides to mount an armed attack on a Silicon Valley company, Representative Matt Gaetz (Authoritarian Putz-Fla.) will likely be among the first to say he would never condone such violence (but you gotta admit the shooter, had a point). Then he’ll turn his vitriol to whatever company happened to be the target, blaming them for pushing a patriotic American past his breaking point.

At an ironically named America First rally with Marjorie Taylor Greene (Contemptible windbag-Ga.), Gaetz is on record saying that Americans don’t have a right, but an obligation, to invoke the Second Amendment in pushing back against technology companies who supposedly cancel what Gaetz considers to be conservative viewpoints. If they espoused support for smaller government and personal responsibility, they’d be fine. Instead, his supporters are posting provably false and irresponsible rhetoric that led to what some Republicans appear to consider extreme tourism on January 6.

The internet’s hall monitors out in Silicon Valley, they think they can suppress us, discourage us. Maybe if you’re just a little less patriotic. Maybe if you just conform to their way of thinking a little more, then you’ll be allowed to participate in the digital world. Well you know what? Silicon Valley can’t cancel this movement, or this rally, or this Congressman. We have a Second Amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it.”

Gaetz at a rally Thursday

Then he went on to say, “The Second Amendment—this is a little history for all the fake news media—the Second Amendment is not about hunting, it’s not about recreation, it’s not about sports. The Second Amendment is about maintaining, within the citizenry, the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary.”

Of course, when one of his followers shoots up people involved with one of the companies, they’ll have nothing to do with the policies he opposes. They’ll just work there.

It takes a special kind of intellectual contortion to invoke patriotism in the same breath as saying Americans are obligation to shoot up businesses and maybe overthrow the government. When I came up, Conservatives rightfully condemned the people who blew up businesses and threatened to overthrow the US government as, you know, unAmerican.

Now, to be a good American, you should want to overthrow the government. That’s sort of like saying Susan Smith loved her kids when she drown then in a car 27 years ago.

Insurrection Ken and Sedition Barbie at a rally.

Gaetz and Taylor Greene know exactly what they’re doing. It’s the same passive-aggressive game of gotcha former President Donald Trump used when he implied that Megan Kelly, a journalist who dared ask him a hard question, was menstruating. Then, after being called on it, he become offended that anyone could possibly interpret his comments that way.

Except this time, Gaetz is playing with peoples’ lives. His comments are a direct call to the fringes of the fringe that follows him to pick up arms and kill someone who works for one of the “Internet hall monitors.” More than that, he’s planting seeds for a potential civil war down the line.

When it happens, Gaetz will deny responsibility and play the victim card and anyone would ever think such a horrible thing (and people will defend him).

Gaetz is under investigation for a litany of crimes, and the walls are closing in. Both his ex-girlfriend and a former ally, Joel Greenberg, have agreed to cooperate in a sex trafficking investigation that seems to be focusing on Gaetz.

Let that sink in. A member of Congress is under investigation for paying for sex with a minor and has openly called for people to take up arms against American companies and maybe against the government itself. And people are still turning out to support him.

His rhetoric, if posted on any social media, would be rightfully removed as potentially inciting a mass shooting.

That’s why he and his allies want social media companies to be fined for suspending accounts like his. It’s hard to provoke war when no one can hear you.

Experts say we’re looking for more human connections. If only we’d be braver about that effort…

The BBC article’s headline promised a fun, salacious, read. Are we heading towards a summer of sex? After all, sex is fun and sexy and all those good things and it’s been a hell of a year in multiple dimensions. Who wouldn’t want to let your hair down and go for it?

As it turns out, the article says, a lot of people.

In short, people are lonely, rather than horney, and the connection they might want most of all is a human connection that goes beyond the mere horizontal bop.

The article focuses on dating and the potential evolution from wanting to “get me some,” to wanting to get to know you and then, maybe, at some point in the future, hitting the sheets. Justin Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute, the largest schtupping research organization in the world, said, “The human animal is craving human emotional connection. And I think that doesn’t necessarily mean just sex.”

Perhaps it’s more than the pandemic that will drive us to want to spent time with other people looking for connection.

We’re increasingly polarized in almost every facet of society. Donald Trump leveraged and increased that polarization, but he hardly created it. Even before 2016, political and societal fault lines ran deep and increasingly segregated us from each other. Our ability to disagree on positions but agree on principles has been fractured by an Internet-driven “reality” that makes it possible to shape the world according to our viewpoints and exclude those who don’t share our moral certainty on important issues.

Whether it’s Fox News and Hannity or NPR and Rachel Maddow, the boundaries of our world can exclude ideas we find uncomfortable. Our worlds increasingly become echo chambers. When we’ve created a world consisting of people who agree with us, it’s a lot easier to find fault with anyone who doesn’t.

I’m talking to you, you morally bankrupt cretin.

In a world where you can literally reach out and touch someone on the other side of the world, our worlds have become smaller and much more insular.

Perhaps it’s like pining for unicorns and rainbow-colored bunnies, but the need to connect is about more than the Covid. Maybe it’s the beginning of recognition that it’s possible to disagree on big issues and still find meaningful relationships. Perhaps, we might take the opportunity to look for reasons to include people, rather than feeling victorious when we disqualify them.

As individuals, when difficulties arise, we have two choices. We can harden and build higher and thicker walls to insulate ourselves. Or we can look at the frailties in others as opportunities to build mutually beneficial relationships.

The world is hurting right now, and though it’s probably naive to think it’ll happen, it’s a great opportunity to recognize that none of us are alone in that situation.

The Cuomos’ cozy relationship isn’t the problem; it gives us what we’re asking for in news coverage

Though I’ve never been a Cuomo fan, on the face of it, I don’t care if Chris Cuomo give his brother, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, advice in handling the sexual misconduct and Covid-related scandals that have tripped him up over the last few months. I don’t care much whether he did it as part of a meeting with gubernatorial staffers. Who wouldn’t help their brother with personal expertise in a time of trouble?

Chris and Andrew Cuomo

CNN President Jeff Zucker has chosen not to suspend Chris Cuomo for his actions, though Cuomo did apologize for his actions and the doubt it cast upon CNN journalists.

Chris Cuomo had a series of cozy interviews with his brother as part of the overall media fawning about his early handling of the Covid crisis. (I sure it’s totally coincidental that the interviews, which came at a time when everyone was locked in and scared, garnered great ratings.) As Andrew Cuomo’s media star dimmed, Chris Cuomo went back to his original stance of not covering stories involving his brother.

CNN, once a seemingly moderate choice between the advocacy journalism at FOX News and MSNBC, has joined in and developed its own passionate voice. In general, that voice falls to the left. In general, no one would mistake Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, or any other major cable news primetime host for Edward R. Murrow. As sports media has known for decades, opinions equal ratings. Level-headed factual reporting doesn’t.

Opinion-based “news” programming is fine. Helping your brother out is fine.

But when the lines blur between the “journalists” and the people they’re covering, problems ensue.

On FOX, Sean Hannity’s relationship with former President Trump gave him great access and built ratings. But as Trump’s actions became more extreme, Hannity had to choose how to manage the story. He chose to stick with the President, reporting on him while he was advising him. To Chris Cuomo’s credit, he didn’t cover his brother when he was advising him.

Journalists, especially advocacy journalists, like to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But their relationships with the powerful run counter to that. In other professions, there’s at least lip service to avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

As customers of the news industry, we should demand the same. Unfortunately, that will never happen. More and more, we’re not looking to be informed. We’re looking for a cheerleader to point out what’s horrible in the world and rally our emotions to moral superiority.

Sean Hannity and Donald Trump

The issue isn’t Chris and Andrew Cuomo, Jeff Zucker, Rachel Maddow, Trump, and Hannity. The issue is us.

In place of news coverage, we demand advocacy, as long as it’s the right advocacy. Many of the people who spent decades trying to get Rush Limbaugh off the air routinely cozy up to Rachel Maddow. Many who rage at the Cuomos regularly watch or listen to Sean Hannity. (Full disclosure: I get a fair chunk of my broadcast news from KFI radio, which leans sane-conservative.)

The real problem

It’s fun to get your sports news from guys who see things our way. But the nation’s political future isn’t sports. Donald Trump’s antics drove a violent attack on one of the symbols of our freedom. Andrew Cuomo allegedly sexually harassed employees and may have caused scores of deaths at nursing homes. This isn’t the Houston Astros beating on a garbage can to steal pitches.

Regardless of political stances, people like Trump and Andrew Cuomo need to be viewed with skepticism by the people who cover them. Period.

Until that happens, our freedoms are at stake.

Florida social media law requires private businesses to accept government overreach (except Disney, of course)

For a time, I was impressed with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. In spite of the campaign ad where he all but humped Donald Trump’s leg, he made some surprisingly un-Trumplike decisions. Then he went back to leg humping.

Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump

His latest grind against the former President’s ankle is a law he signed that prohibits technology platforms from suspending or banning accounts belonging to political candidates in the state. Fines range from $25,000 per day to $250,000 per day per politician, depending on the level of office the offender is running for.

Suspensions of up to 14 days or the removal of individual posts is allowed under the new law. And Florida residents will also be able to sue companies for suspensions or bans for up to $100,000.

One the reasonable side, the law requires more transparency for all users when their account is suspended. It’s not uncommon for someone to find their account locked with no specific explanation about what caused that discipline, beyond “Here’s are rules; you broke one of them.”

I lost my first Twitter account that way. To this day, I don’t know what caused it. As social media platforms benefit from businesses run on them, the businesses deserve warnings and a specific reason for any accounts being frozen or locked.

The harm in this law far outweighs the benefit. The law would create two special classes of users. The first is any company that runs an amusement park in the state. They’re exempt from being sued. Basically, the law indicates you can’t ban someone for saying that Donald Trump clearly won the election and that January 6 was a tour group–unless you’re Disney, because they pay their lobbyists good money to make sure they’re treated well.

The second is anyone running for office in Florida. Under the terms of this law, they can say anything they want under this law, and other than two weeks in the penalty box, there’s not a damn thing social media companies can do about it.

The First Amendment right to free speech doesn’t apply to private companies. My employer could fire me for this blog post and be Constitutionally covered if they did. If I walk into my neighborhood bar and say it’s time to kill Nancy Pelosi, they can throw me out. So can Twitter, Facebook, and the other socials. To force them to carry content would be turning privately owned services into public accommodations.

The irony is that Republicans are using government power to tell these private companies exactly how they need to run their business. And Democrats are saying the government needs to get off their backs and let them run their businesses as they see fit.

Republicans’ devotion to free expression is just as limited as Democrats’. In their world, Colin Kaepernick has no right whatsoever to kneel during the national anthem. But Twitter and Facebook must be required to carry opinions blessed by Donald Trump, the man who fondled the flag Colin Kaepernick is supposed to have disrespected. Freedom of speech means saying what they want when they want it, Evelyn Beatrice Hall and Voltaire be damned.

When the validity of the First Amendment applies only to sentiments supported by one political party or the other, it loses all its value.

President Trump incited an insurrection on January 6. He was clearly in violation of terms for any of the social media platforms he used. After a multitude of warnings–more than you or I would’ve gotten–they banned him. The platforms that coddled him violated their terms with their hosting companies and were forced to shut down because they wouldn’t comply with terms in contracts they signed. Conservatism used to stand for responsibility. When you violate the terms of a contract, you pay the price.

Conservatism doesn’t stand for that any more. It stands for using the power of the government to bury anyone who disagrees with you.

Florida became substantially less free with this overreach. Then again, Ron DeSantis doesn’t believe in deregulation. He, like the guy whose leg he humps, believes companies should be free to do their bidding only.

Fibro: We’re constrained, but not helpless

Monday morning, I made up for falling asleep late by waking up early. Then, when it was time to get up and exercise, I wanted to do anything–even root for the Yankees–more than I wanted to get out of bed. It wasn’t bad, but pain swirled through my body–pausing now and again to bite into a specific area before coming to rest in my right big toe.

I had a holdover problem from Friday I had no idea how to solve and a contentious call staring me in the face.

And it was Monday morning, the day promised to be filled with stress, and quite frankly, i just didn’t want to. Even my daily Facebook gratitude post was a back-handed complaint.

I logged in and the day was everything I expected it to be–and that was a bad thing.

You will come to a place
Where the only thing you feel
Are loaded guns in your face

The last time I had a stress-filled day, I crashed in the afternoon and it took me three days to feel right again. That was the road I was starting down.

And for the first time in my life, I really didn’t have that option.

Call it dumb luck, the walk I stopped to take, or the moment I took the opportunity to breathe before the contentious call. Call it the intervention of the Holy Spirit (which it might’ve been). Call it what you want, but I decided that whatever was happening today, it wasn’t worth three days of my life.

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t feel the need to make that trade off. I wouldn’t have had pain swirling around. I wouldn’t need to cap off the work day with a twenty-minute nap (and still feel dopey after).

As people with the Fibro know, this is anything but a perfect world. Our constraints aren’t visible, neither are they made up. They vary immensely, from person to person and day to day. Like a well-fed cat with a mouse, it won’t kill us; it’ll play with us for its own amusement for as along as it likes.

For some, the constraints are far greater than mine. They’d love a month with three days of relative agony. For others, like me, the burden is lighter.

For all of us, reality is immutable. Fibromyalgia will be a fact of life until we die.

It can make you feel helpless to resist. After a while, it can lead you to give in, just because anything else is too damn much work.

And yet, we still exercise some level of autonomy. Stress and annoyance used to be cheap for me. They weren’t fun, but the cost wasn’t high enough to add to the effort of dealing with the annoyances of the moment.

When I got diagnosed, the cost of stress went up.

Making myself see Monday differently wasn’t fun. It wasn’t easy. I can’t guarantee to replicate it tomorrow.

But for a day, at least, I was able to own my body and tell the Fibro demon to screw itself. I was able to lay full claim to the part of my life I control.

In doing so, I mastered something–for a day, at least–that’s eluded my grasp for most of my adult life.

It’s not everything, But for a day, it was enough.

I was wrong about hate crimes

“I’m confused,” I said at the time. “Could someone show be a time when someone was beaten or killed because of love?”

That was a long time ago, when I opposed the concept of a hate crime.

The crime is already illegal, I said. A dead person isn’t any more dead because of hate. An assaulted person was still assaulted. The multiplier is wrong. It places more value on one class of person than another.

Maybe there were fewer idiots at the time. Maybe they stayed home more. Or maybe we weren’t paying attention.

We add multipliers for all kinds of crimes. There are special circumstances charges for using a gun during a crime, gang affiliation, attacks on the elderly, and more. If you beat or kill someone because of their race, gender, religion, or any number of other characteristics, it’s a crime against that person, but it’s also a crime against the entire community.

It deserves special circumstances.

But hate crime multipliers don’t seem to be working. It seems that stupid people all over the country don’t understand that while the Covid may have originated in China, your neighbor who looks Far Eastern didn’t cause the damn thing. And they’re probably less likely to give you the Covid than your idiot brother-in-law who spent the pandemic licking doorknobs and yelling at people about wearing masks and living in fear.

Besides, that neighbor could be Japanese, Korean, or Filipino.

And that guy who wears a Yarmulke probably didn’t bulldoze a Palestinian home or push a greedy policy at the secret Jewish banker meeting that caused your neighbor to lose their home in the 2009 banking crash.

Both of these types of attacks are going on now. We’ve also seen attacks against people of color because of their color, gays and lesbians because of who they schtupp in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and Arabs because some Arabs called us the Great Satan and threatened to blow us up.

Such attacks are antithetical to freedom. They move us away from a nation of laws to a nation of raw power, exercised against the powerless. Ironically, these attacks are sometimes done in the name of freedom.

Most people in this country aren’t actively racist. They may do racist things time and again. They may have blind spots. But most would not beat the hell out of someone for the sin of having a great great great (times 50) grandfather who may or may not have crucified Jesus.

And yet, those attacks seem to be multiplying. It’s not just a narrative aimed at abridging freedom of expression. In general, hate appears to be on the rise.

It’s not enough to be neutral in these matters. As a country, we must be crystal clear that no attack on the basis of hated of the other can be tolerated.

Given the recent explosion of these attacks, it seems that maybe it’s time to increase those penalties–and apply then any time any hate against a group is the trigger.

We’re better than that and need to start showing it.

In praise of people who do what seems impossible

Yesterday, a couple of friends ran a 50K race. That’s not a typo. They got up, drove a while, ran 31 miles, and then came home.

Yesterday, I ran five miles and walked a sixth and felt pretty good about myself. I’m awed that they were able to do between five and six times the work I did.

Clearly, you don’t just roll out of bed and run that far. You have to do the work to get there. In their case, it means dragging your butt out of bed earlier than you want to, then running past scores of houses where intelligent people are still sleeping before they get up and go to work. It means building time for workouts into vacations. It means sore feet and strained muscles and, at least in Florida, getting home from a run as the sun comes up slick with sweat from running in Satan’s armpit.

I’m in a loosely formed running group with these people. Their accomplishment leaves me awed and inspired. They’re an example for me.

As a runner, I aspire to run a marathon. I’ve done a half marathon and I know that if my training keeps up, I can go that far. Most marathon training plans top out at 20 miles. If you run twenty miles on a marathon, you still have a 10K to complete. Completing that additional 10K is as much a mental exercise as a physical one.

Aligning myself with people who’ve done what I want to do puts me in a better position to do it myself. I can ask them questions about what they did–what worked for them and what didn’t work. What their mental approach was.

I actually learned something mental today from one of those friends: get a mantra during a race and when your mind starts to complain, repeat the mantra. If you’re twenty miles out, just start repeating to yourself Twenty is my number. My number is twenty. The mantra–whatever I choose–gives your brain something to focus on rather than concentrating on the fact that there’s literally nothing you wouldn’t rather be doing at this time than running.

I’ll try that–but for now, my number will be a lot lower.

My friends don’t run to inspire other people. It’s just what they do. The inspiration is a fringe benefit.

There’s something everyone does that can inspire someone else. You may not know what your thing is. But it’s there. And it’s making a difference for other people.

I may never run 31 miles in one shot–right now, that’s most of a week for me. But it could happen. The fact that these people have done it, makes it not impossible.

It’s good to be around people who do the impossible.

I’ll mask up for now, because…

The science is clear. If you have the Covid vaccine, you’re a dead end for infections. That’s what Dr. Fauci–the guy whose guidance we’ve been lectured to follow–said. Almost certainly if you’re vaccinated and you get the Covid, you’ll get a very mild case and just as certainly, you won’t pass it along to others.

Scientifically–and we’ve been scolded to follow the science–the functional odds of spreading Covid after vaccination are zero.

But I’ll still carry a mask with me and probably mask up in most places a while longer.

It’s not to protect the children. Kids are least likely to have significant reaction to the Covid. It’s not to protect the people who choose not to be vaccinated–they’re adults and made their choice. They have to deal with the results.

It’s not for the people who can’t be vaccinated. I can’t infect them.

It’s because some–a vocal minority–are skittery about people without masks.

In general, you don’t make good public policy by catering to the fears of the most risk-averse among us. If we did that, no one would leave the house after dark and football would be played with long sticks with tickle feathers on the end–two-hand tickle.

But this is a meaningful exception to that general rule.

People who got the vaccine should be able to enjoy the fruits of that act–and it wasn’t fun for me. But I’ll cater to the fears of the squeamish for now.

We’ve been through a lot over the past fourteen months. We’ve spent a lot of time isolated and seeing each other either outside, from a distance, or via Zoom (or the app of your choice).

I sat at a bar last weekend for the first time in almost 2% of my life. That kind of depravation is bound to leave a mark.

It’s in deference to the shared experience we went through that I’ll defer. For a while. If I enter a place that asks for a mask, I’ll wear it. If I go in and a significant percentage are masked, I’ll join them. If most people aren’t, I won’t.

I won’t let other people’s fears rule my life. I choose to make a mask decision. And I do it to give some a little time to get comfortable with the evolving reality. Maybe they lost a lot of people around them. Maybe they were severely ill and didn’t know if they’d make it. Who knows? Who cares?

I’m not certain when I’ll stop; I guess I’ll know when I get there. But for now, though I have the freedom–and should have the freedom–to forego the damn thing, I’ll keep wearing it.

But the day is coming when I’ll choose to exercise my freedom. And it will be a glorious day for sure.