Charlie Warzel: Why Mid-flight Unmasking Videos Are So Uncanny

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Charlie Warzel
@cwarzel
wrote about how it feels like we’ve entered yet another profoundly weird & hard moment of the pandemic. a period of dispiriting societal failures & regressions alongside bits of good news. a general sense of bizarre, hollow half-victories and setbacks

newsletters.theatlantic.com
Why Mid-flight Unmasking Videos Are So Uncanny
At this strange stage of the pandemic, we continue to direct ire at individuals instead of addressing larger issues.
8:13 PM · Apr 21, 2022

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/6260a4a912500c0020c91966/cdc-mask-mandate-plane-flight-attendants/

Late Monday night, following a U.S. district court ruling, the White House announced that TSA would no longer enforce the federal mask mandate inside airports and on flights. The news spread quickly. Within an hour, videos and anecdotes emerged online of giddy in-flight announcements from flight attendants delivering the news that masks were now optional. In some cases, passengers cheered. In one viral clip, a flight attendant is seen walking down the aisle holding a trash bag and singing, “throw out your masks!” It was an uncanny, not all that surprising, and, for many, deflating moment. In other words: an extremely 2022 moment.

The mask-mandate repeal has been divisive (on Wednesday, the CDC asked the Justice Department to appeal the ruling that lifted the travel mask mandate). The pandemic is not over—as of this writing there are 14,790 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States. The coronavirus continues to evolve. Long COVID (a subject we're still learning about) continues to be a very real scourge for many suffering Americans. And portions of America’s disabled and immunocompromised populations, while much better protected in the vaccine era, are still vulnerable to the disease. To those who recognize and prioritize these concerns, the mandate repeal is yet another dispiriting sign of a country that feels like it has given up completely on pandemic mitigation, creating an environment where risk calculus and assumption are strictly personal choices—a dereliction of government duty that leaves a country’s most vulnerable out to sea.

To those inclined to cheer on the repeal (note: a recent AP-NORC poll shows this group is substantially in the minority and most people are in favor of masks for travelers) and bare their faces to an airplane cabin, the news was greeted as rational. Yes, there’s the selfish, reprehensible crowd that has recklessly protested masks since the beginning, but there’s also a group of vaccinated passengers who’ve complied with the mandate until now and feel it no longer makes sense. This crowd is largely framed as being “done with COVID,” and while that’s partially true, many of these people also see the repeal as reflecting the reality that it doesn’t make sense to mask in one place if masks are not required in most others. Or they claim to believe that those who want to mask can do so. (For what it’s worth, I believe that, unlike restaurants or sports venues, public transit serves a different, more crucial function, and that rules, like mask wearing, that make transportation safer for a larger swath of people are crucially important so as to not exclude anyone from essential services.)

As expected, both of these camps clashed in the usual online and media spaces. The online fight over the repeal has its own cringey nomenclature—Covidians versus Coviditiots. Covidians are uncharitably framed as not just overly cautious but also as people who seem to enjoy COVID restrictions. They’re painted as miserable scolds, trapping the rest of America in an isolated, masked future. The Covidiots can occupy a broad category that includes everyone from the reckless anti-vaxxers to those who now dine indoors or work in offices without masks. They are portrayed as not just selfish, but, in extreme cases, as pro-virus.

*snip*