As the mask mandates ease, as we’re less frequently asked to show our vaccine passports, these two and a half years in, one new thing I’ve noticed is the increased human capacity to allow to each her or his own.
I was covering a speech by the radical firebrand Angela Davis, still with the clenched fist at 78, the other morning in a hotel ballroom. At check-in, the nice young woman from the YWCA asked if I had a mask on me. “In my pocket,” I told her. “You’re fine without,” she said, “but Ms. Davis has asked that when she comes out to speak, that the audience mask up.” “No problem,” I said. “Respect.”
When the former Black Panther came onstage to begin, she herself was unmasked — speaker’s prerogative; she had to talk for half an hour — but, my breakfast finished, I slipped mine on. I looked around the room. Something more than half of the hundreds in attendance had masks on; many didn’t. Show went on. No one said boo.
Sunday, attending a poetry reading by a longtime teacher of mine, we were asked to mask up when we weren’t noshing and slurping prosecco. No problem. When the poet took the podium, slipping his own mask down to read, I looked around the smaller crowd of 30 or so. Everyone had pulled a mask on, except for a friend of mine, whose politics I know to be conservative, and her mother, whose politics I know not. Again, no mask police tut-tutted. For some perhaps perverse, or solidarity-seeking, reason, I pulled my own mask down when hugging my friend goodbye.
Is it all just, in that cant phrase, virtue-signaling by now? Not quite sure. It’s some kind of new laissez-faire, face-covering-wise. Live and let live.
And there was an especially fascinating moment two weekends ago at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I helped put together a program honoring the Los Angeles Times’ Ron Lin as the alum of the year from our mutual student paper, the Daily Californian. I asked another alum, Erin Allday of the San Francisco Chronicle, to be in conversation with Ron as the highlight of the gathering. Ron has been the Times’ ace COVID reporter, working out of the Bay Area, since the beginning; Erin has been the Chronicle’s health reporter for years. They covered precisely the same beat. And yet they had never before met. It was a fascinating interview in the J school library as they told us all what it’s been like covering the hottest story in the world since March 2020.
Ron, who has remained uninfected, wore a mask in his director’s chair. Erin, who recovered several months ago from a coronavirus bout, did not wear a mask; like me, also recently recovered, she’s feeling a bit immune for the time being at least. The audience also mixed it up. To each their own.
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The plague we’ve been through, the one that is not yet done with us, has brought out the best and the worst in people.
The best is obvious.
From the earliest days when COVID-19 emerged and began swiftly to sicken and kill people around the world, physicians and nurses headed directly into the line of fire, the way that cops and journalists run toward a gun going off, though no one else would. That’s their job, sure, just as it’s ours. But they sure did it brilliantly, though it killed so many of them the same as it did the rest of us.
Pharmaceutical companies swiftly developed vaccines against the deadly disease, completely belying the common wisdom that it would take years. Yes, they worked differently than their makers thought. But I’ll take the way they do work — dramatically decreasing the seriousness of the disease — over the alternative.
Now, we’re all kind of muddling through. But I think we’ve learned a thing, or two.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.