I Love Big Brother

I stopped wearing a mask several months ago.

There is enough scientific evidence to convince me I should be more worried about the possible health consequences of wearing a mask all my waking life than the dangers of contracting COVID-19 (from which I have already recovered). Couple that with absolute lack of evidence that masks stop transmission of the disease and the incredible hypocrisy of the elites who institute such draconian mandates, and I've had enough. I'm done wearing masks. Either I will not wear one, or I won't go to places that require them, even if that is incredibly inconvenient.

I thought everyone else around me was done as well. They certainly complained about it enough. All my friends and colleagues expressed staunch support for my civil disobedience. Imagine my surprise when I was the only person at work and in my neighborhood to stop wearing a mask indoors, in deliberate disobedience to the inconsistent and ridiculous mandates. Everyone likes to talk a good game, but no one wants to subject themselves to the slightest possibility of discomfort or conflict, even if it means retaking control of their lives.

Civil disobedience only works, however, if it is coordinated and undertaken by large groups of citizens. Mine has failed.

So, I give up. No one is following me. They are content to do as their progressive overlords demand and grumble about it quietly behind their face diapers. I can't continue to fight a one-man battle against the usurpers of our civil liberties.

Especially since I have now been beaten down back into my place. The powers that be have finally taken notice of my pathetic attempt at civil disobedience and cut me off at the knees. If I weren't alone in my defiance, there might have been a chance for it to succeed.

Mel Gibson's movie "The Patriot," tells the story of one patriot standing against the oppressive regime, fighting single-handedly to save his family and his country. There are two problems: 1) it is fiction, and 2) the character on whom The Patriot is loosely based, Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox), had an organized network of other patriots to support him in his resistance.

And that is something I don't have. A network of support. Watching Fox News, sharing conservative links on Facebook and Twitter, and making snide passive-aggressive comments about Democrats under your breath when someone comments about inflation or the price of gas may make conservatives feel smugly superior, but it doesn't actually do anything to help.

No one person can be successful in resisting the government. He may at some point be vindicated in his beliefs, but he will first be crushed.

I don't mean to be hyperbolic. I'm not saying I'm on the level of an American founding father because I don't put on a mask when I walk into Target. The stakes aren't that high yet.

Yet.

That's the thing that discourages me the most, I suppose. If we aren't willing to push back against this relatively moderate infringement of our rights by refusing to wear a mask in public, who in their right mind thinks any significant number of people will resist serious oppression, if and when it comes?

We are talking about mask mandates, which the vast majority of people subject to them rightly think are ridiculous.

I know for a fact that the vast majority of people around whom I live and with whom I work think they are ridiculous. I know my family thinks they are stupid. We literally talk about it all the time.

Nevertheless, everyone continues to submit to them. It's just easier that way, I get it. But it's only more manageable in the short term. It's less of a hassle to get into the Walmart or to go buy stamps. But when you look around a year or two later, and everyone is still wearing masks without a thought, only now you're required to get the vaccine and like it or else you'll lose your job, and people who dare to ask common-sense questions like, "If the vaccine is supposed to protect you and you get one, how am I a threat to you if I don't?" are called fringe lunatics, and you can't go places without showing the government-directed corporate Gestapo your vaccine papers...you start to realize that maybe we, as a society, should have pumped the brakes on this whole thing a lot sooner.

That's something we could have done...something we could still be doing by refusing to abide by ridiculous indoor mask mandates. This march toward total domination of the individual by the State will only end when we, as free people, decide that it will end.

But I quit. I'm out.

I've now been formally ordered to submit. I will spare the gory details, but I have now concluded that I have no reasonable alternative but to comply. If all the people who had hushed subversive conversations with me about how stupid the mask thing was would have translated their words into actions, things might be different for us all. But they didn't, and they're not. I held out as long as I could, but without broader support, I now capitulate.

Perhaps in the end, before the bullet enters my brain, I to will also win the victory over myself and come to love Big Brother, in addition to just submitting to him. ###