Things are bad, but they can get better. Just keep your mask on. Not long ago, it felt as though we were finally willing to break from our old, broken ways. This tone of optimism was immortalized in a video posted online in late April by 26-year-old Tomos Roberts (aka Probably Tom Foolery), who wrote a bedtime story imagining our post-pandemic future.
In his four-minute poem, which has tens of millions of views on Facebook and YouTube, Roberts describes the world prior to the outbreak of Covid-19 — our isolating addiction to screens, our destruction of the Earth, and our political resistance to change. But then, as Roberts’ story goes, the virus arrived, and our culture started to shift. After hiding in our homes, we reemerged to find that not only had we changed, but our ideas of society had progressed for the better.
The video simplistically and saccharinely captured both the sense of community we quickly adopted as the virus spread as well as a frisson of possibility underlying the bleak headlines. Because, in the beginning, we really did change. We stayed home, for one thing, and we stayed apart. We reconnected with old friends. We ditched the makeup. We baked.
And, of course, we started wearing masks.
Overall, things were still horrific. As death rates climbed, health systems struggled to cope. There were fresh outbreaks. Millions lost their jobs. People became destitute; they started starving. It was unspeakably grim. But those first weeks of the pandemic were also clarifying. We became moral philosophers, discerning what mattered and what didn’t. We scrutinized the systems underpinning our society with a renewed perspective, and our old controversies seemed suddenly trivial.
Just as noticeable as those who refuse to wear a mask are the number who do.
We started to talk about basic needs like health care and shelter as human rights. We agreed that the air was cleaner and that there should be bike lanes and more space for pedestrians. We wondered about inequality and the health and economic risk we imposed on another human with each app-assisted delivery to our door — the real price of convenience. We saw the disparities in our cities, with the poorest areas mapped as viral hotspots. We scolded those who abandoned us, those who gouged us, and those who profited from us. It felt like we were learning something and that if people were to die, it would not be for nothing.
But now, just a month or two later, it already feels like maybe we blew it. That vague hope we had for a better society already feels muted. Things feel as though they’re going from bad to worse. Is there any hope left?
Even as Roberts was posting his poem to YouTube about creating a new system, the old one was already declaring itself in familiar ways. The relative invisibility of a virus that forces people into isolation, cordons them off in hospitals and makes them die alone meant that, as time went on and the pockets of severity were somewhat contained, it became easier to deny — either that the virus was killing people at the reported rate or that it wasn’t artificial or that it even existed at all. As Colin Dickey wrote at Real Life magazine last month, with few images of the ill to validate our experience or few lasting physical markings to act as a constant reminder and warning of the pandemic, one item came to symbolize the virus’s presence: our face masks.
The standard synthetic, cloth, or hand-sewn face mask has become ubiquitous since the onset of the pandemic. They’re everywhere — or, they were. As it turned out, the mask’s disposability and, to some extent, its unavailability made it the easiest part of the lockdown’s rigid constraints to start pushing back against. In fact, its prominence as a visual marker of the virus made things pretty simple: Deny the mask; deny the virus.
For if you didn’t wear a mask, was the pandemic really happening? And if the pandemic wasn’t really happening, or at least not to the degree some claimed, were all these sacrifices — the shutdown, the isolation — really necessary? And if all that wasn’t necessary, then why couldn’t everything just stay the same?
Denying the mask actually means denying that anything must, or can, change.
President Donald Trump often espoused this line of warped logic by doubting the severity of the virus or trading in conspiracy theories about its origins or impact. And in turn, the mask, and the decision to wear one in public, quickly became a signal of a particular political worldview. A pattern is noticeable. Trump, denier-in-chief, didn’t wear one to visit a mask factory. He also didn’t wear one to a coronavirus test swab production facility (which meant all that day’s tests had to be trashed). The only thing Trump uses the mask for is political attacks.
But Trump’s habit is symptomatic of a larger trend. In the countless videos pouring down social feeds for over a week of protests across the U.S., the mask is a dividing line. “At these demonstrations, masks are ubiquitous, symbolizing civic action in more ways than one: Even as they protect the community from the virus, they protest the surveillance of the police,” Amanda Hess wrote last week at the New York Times. Indeed, in New York City, police are also refusing to wear face masks despite ongoing official state orders, adding to the danger they pose to peaceful protesters. “It’s symbolic,” Cynthia Godsoe, a demonstrator in New York City told TIME magazine. “They are blatantly snubbing us.”
But denying the need for a mask, and thus the virus, is about more than just picking a political side or believing that this denial can somehow repel the disease. Denying the mask actually means denying that anything must, or can, change. It means favoring the reassertion of the exact economic, political, and ideological systems that were called into question at the onset of the pandemic. Or, as it’s usually expressed: “getting things back to normal.”
Yet, this mask divide, created intentionally to realign us along the old arguments and fault lines — the ones that helped create a splintered society and also reinforce it — cuts both ways. Just as noticeable as those who refuse to wear a mask are the number who do.
As the disparities, inequalities, and injustices that the pandemic has exposed are compounded daily, there is still cause for hope. Because for now, if you’re still wearing a mask, you still admit there is a pandemic, you still accept reality, you can still see things for what they are. If you’re still wearing a mask, you’re still willing to think about a greater good and about how you can make things better — and not just for yourself. Most of all, if you’re still wearing a mask, you still believe in change — that it can happen and that it should — even if it means the life you once had, and the things you were once used to, aren’t quite the same again. Ditch the mask and all that goes with it.
Things are bad. But they can get better. We haven’t blown this yet — just keep your masks on.