In the past few months, Karens all across America have had to embark on a journey to the nearest name changing federal office due to TikTok. Karen has become a societal concept, encapsulating all the annoying middle-aged women with 2010 Justin Bieber haircuts that you cannot stand. If you’ve ever come across a lady who wanted to speak with the manager, or one who called the police because a Black family was having a barbecue, you’ve already seen a Karen in real life, so I am sorry for you. In most recent events with the pandemic, the Karen population has grown due to the anti-masker movement.
Here are my five reasons why the Karen in front of you is not wearing a mask:
- Fake News!
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While President Trump claims that all leftist media ever shares is “fake news,” we all know that he is the actual King of Fake News, and mask policy is no exception. Since the beginning of the pandemic, while state and local governments (for the most part) enforced wearing masks in public spaces, POTUS enjoyed tweeting about how useless and unnecessary they are, and agreed with idiotic anti-maskers who claim that it impedes citizens of their freedom. For example, Trump has held countless rallies for his campaign without enforcing people to wear masks and mocking Joe Biden for masking up because he only cares about winning the election. It is disappointing to see to what extent a president does not only lie but uses BS because he is focused on votes, rather than on what is best (in a literal matter of life and death) for the American people. Anyway, that worked out well for the anti-mask king, didn’t it?
- Privileged Arrogance
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Like everyone else, I went home when the pandemic began. After months in quarantine, I finally began hanging out with high school friends while social distancing. Most kids from my high school went to college and had parents who are college-educated, and surprisingly, despite their education, most of them did not seem to take the pandemic seriously. They would not wear their mask as often as they should have in public spaces, they would not disinfect purchases, and they would hang out inside of each other’s houses. One kid even went to France, where he did not take any COVID-19 precautions, returned to New York and hung out with other people without informing them that he had not been tested upon his arrival.
This blatant carelessness astonished me. First of all, why was he so convinced he could not get severely ill (by a virus that we know very little about and can still be deadly to young people even without pre-existing conditions), or at least give it to his parents, who definitely could get severely ill? Secondly, how can someone have so little regard for a friend and their parents’ lives? I wondered what was the cause of the carelessness of all these people, which had nothing to do with how my Barnard friends were living during quarantine, and concluded that it must be the economic privilege. Most of these people have not had to worry about anything in their lives. Any problem could be fixed with their parents’ cash. So, surely, if somebody were to fall severely ill, more expensive treatment (which they could all afford) could fix that problem in one second. Worst of all, I’m sure most of them did not even go far enough into this reasoning; it was probably unconscious evidence.
- The Dostoevskian Dead Horse Syndrome
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In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s infamous Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov dreams of a bleak day in his childhood, when he emotionally observed a miserable peasant named Mikolka beat an innocent horse to death. Why would a man kill a horse for no reason? He had nothing to lose. Mikolka is a character at the bottom of the class food chain, and killing was his only way of feeling some power over something else in his life.
While anti-maskers are not willingly killing anyone, they are spreading a deadly virus through their respiratory droplets. I believe that some people who may feel powerless in the scheme of their lifestyle may feel empowered by refusing to wear a mask for “the other” because “the other” is likely part of the cause of their misery.
- Innate Phallocentrism
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While today, women in the United States are not directly attacked by the patriarchy on the daily, micro-aggressions remain symptomatic of innate phallocentrism (societal organization wherein the central component is the phallus) embedded in the foundation of our society.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have only taken public transportation a few times. I have ridden the Metro North Railroad and the subway, in both cases sitting in an enclosed space for a long period of time. While it is not news that some people don’t wear masks (literally the title of this article), I was surprised to see so many people without masks on the train, who continued to sit there, ignorantly mask-less, even after the passage of the conductor. Frustrated, I politely asked them to put on their masks, and, feeling stupid and scolded like a child, they would. After nicely asking one man to put on his mask, ten minutes later once we had reached his stop, he made sure to walk past me, slow down and take off his mask, and then keep walking.
While this could just be pettiness, I wonder what the source of his pettiness was. I had not been rude. I wondered whether this grown man had felt attacked, maybe even insulted, by a younger woman who had sought to educate him. Maybe I had touched his pride, his manhood, his phallus, rather than his ignorance, so that interaction was a failure. Does respecting public health measures depend on respecting women?
- The Horacian Epicureans
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In the late spring and summer, when COVID was spreading at its worst, certain countries enforced stricter quarantine regulations than others. For example, in France, people could not travel further than one kilometer away from their home, and needed a written attestation to run errands. There was also a designated daily hour for runners to exercise outside, and people were fined and arrested for breaking the rules. Toward mid-summer, most restrictions were lifted, but now that cases are beginning to rise once more, the rules are making life bleak again. In fact, what was supposed to be a temporary crisis has become a new way of life.
n response to the prolongation of rules to prevent the spread of COVID, some people are voicing opinions that everyone should stop taking precautions for covid except people with pre-existing conditions and the elderly, because quarantine living is not living. I call this outlook on life Horacian Epicurean because it echoes the “Carpe Diem” phrase which Latin poet Horace wrongly interpreted from the Greek Epicureans to mean that we should live life to the fullest as if there is no tomorrow because we do not know when we will die.
I empathize with the frustration at this new “survival” lifestyle, prioritizing security and safety over happiness and socialization. However, it might be more reasonable to think like a Greek Epicurean. They believed that life was to be lived by seeking modest pleasures, like food and a place to sleep. In the context of COVID, that could mean deriving pleasure from having a family, a home, and food on the table despite the lack of possibility to go to an Alicia Keys concert. It is wiser to look at this elongated crisis as temporary over the span of a lifetime, and wearing PPE as a sign of respect for your neighbors.