The silent fury of the responsible people

A person walks without a mask in downtown New York.TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP via Getty Images

Let's talk for a moment about Lollapalooza.

After canceling face-to-face shows last year, Chicago again hosted this long-running music festival a few weeks ago, attracting more than 385,000 attendees.

Many feared the huge, noisy crowds would trigger a coronavirus supercontagion episode.

But the festival required a vaccination certificate or a negative covid test to enter, and introduced the mandatory mask indoors midway through the event.

And it seems that there have been very few infections.

What does this tell us? That in the United States a return to more or less normal life could have been achieved, also with its pleasures, which many hoped that vaccines would bring. The reason we have not done it - the reason we continue to live in fear, with hospitals in much of the South on the brink of collapse - is that there are not enough vaccinated and not enough people wearing masks.

You can feel sympathy for some of the unvaccinated, especially workers who find it difficult to find time to go get vaccinated and worry about missing a day to side effects.

But there are far fewer excuses for those who refuse to get vaccinated or wear a mask for cultural or ideological reasons, and no excuses at all for conservative governors, such as Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas and Doug Ducey in Arizona, who have actively prevented the efforts to contain the most recent outbreak.

What do you guys think of anti-vaccines and anti-masks?

I am outraged by their ridiculousness, even though I can work from home and have no school-age children.

And I suspect that many Americans share my anger.

More information

• The United States once again recommends the use of a mask to those vaccinated due to the increase in infections

• The covid has become a crisis of republican states

The question is whether this fully justified anger - let's call it the anger of those responsible - will have political impact, whether leaders will defend the interests of Americans who are trying to do the right thing but whose lives are being disrupted and endangered by those who do not.

One thing should be obvious: getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public are not “personal options”.

When someone refuses the vaccine or refuses to wear a mask, they are increasing the risk for others of contracting a potentially fatal or disabling disease, and they are also helping to perpetuate the social and economic costs of the pandemic.

In a very real sense, the irresponsible minority is depriving others of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What's more, to say something that should be obvious, those who say they oppose public health measures to protect "freedom" are not being sincere.

The most shocking thing is that, since the masks became a front in the culture war, it has become clear that many of those who oppose their obligation not only demand the right not to have to wear them themselves, but also want that others stop behaving responsibly.

Tucker Carlson has asked his viewers to confront those they see wearing a mask, and there have been scattered reports of violent attacks on people wearing the mask.

It is also astonishing how quickly so-called conservative principles have been abandoned where honoring those principles would aid in attempts to contain the pandemic, rather than harm them.

For decades, conservatives have insisted that business owners should have the right to do what they want: hire and fire at will, deny service to whomever they please.

But here we have Abbott threatening to withdraw the license to sell alcoholic beverages to restaurants that require a vaccination certificate, even though Texas is running out of ICU beds.

Conservatives have also advocated local control of education, except, what a coincidence, when school districts want to protect children through mask-wearing rules, in which case, the governors of "Make America Great Again" want take control and cut off their funding.

So the covid-19 friends are not motivated by the love of freedom.

You could offer some hypotheses about your true motives, but understanding what drives these people is less important than understanding how much damage you are doing.

Double damage when it comes to politicians cynically playing the game of anti-vaccines and anti-masks.

The latest polls indicate that citizens strongly support mandatory masks, and that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose attempts to prevent school districts from protecting children.

I haven't seen polls about attempts to stop businesses from requiring vaccination certificates, although I imagine they must be unpopular as well.

But politicians like Abbott and DeSantis are bowing to the anti-public health minority because it is loud and irritable, and because they don't think it will cost them any political cost.

Well, I think the public health majority is also getting more and more irritated, and with good reason.

What happens is that it has not made enough noise, and very few politicians have tried to take advantage of this justified fury.

So it's time to stop being self-conscious and call destructive behavior by name.

Doing so may make many feel underappreciated.

But you know what?

Their feelings do not give them the right to ruin the lives of others.

Paul Krugman

is a Nobel Laureate in Economics.

© The New York Times, 2021. News Clips translation.