Some See The Glass Half Empty

Here's a headline at The New Republic: Biden Quits The Covid Fight. Some people -- quite possibly a strong majority -- would indeed be clapping, cheering, and tossing their masks in the trash for good. At TNR, not so much:

On Monday, a Trump-appointed judge of questionable legal credentials and an appetite for fileting the English language struck down the CDC’s requirement that “a person must wear a mask while boarding, disembarking, and traveling on any conveyance into or within the United States.” Within hours, major carriers lifted the mask requirements, in some cases during flights, sandbagging passengers who’d taken comfort knowing their fellow passengers were masked.

Now, there's an odd way of looking at it: somewhere in the back rows of Flight 572, hidden behind the passengers twirling their masks on their fingers and dancing in delight, is some grinch hunched over in his seat, sandbagged in the recognition that his fellow passengers were discarding their masks and now free to spread the virus unchecked. The airline didn't even have the decency to wait until the plane had landed and the passengers had disembarked to make the announcement!

In fact, this is now seen as a potential problem for the industry:

While we saw many videos of airline passengers joyously celebrating and tossing their face masks into trash bags when the mandate was lifted, not everyone was happy about it. In fact, some people began making preparations to cancel upcoming trips because of their fear of sitting on the same airplane as someone who is not masked up. But will those people be offered a refund for tickets that they had purchased in advance?

But it's worse than that. Consider the dilemma of the grinch on Flight 572, whose journey isn't over when the plane lands in Denver -- he has to transfer to another flight, and this one will now be full of the unmasked! He'll have no choice in the matter! Even if he demands a refund, he still has to find a way home! And let's say he decides to rent a car to finish his trip instead of flying with the unmasked. He'll still need to ride the shuttle to the rental agency, and likely nobody on the shuttle will wear masks, either! And that doesn't even solve the problem of the unmasked in the gate and terminal areas now that the TSA is no longer enforcing the mandate!

And it gets worse. Does Hertz still sanitize and fully disinfect its cars between each rental? Contrast that with the reaction of a flight attendant to the end of the mandate:

Since the beginning of COVID, the disposition of the customers has been pretty angry. They’d get on the plane upset. And for the first time, it felt like everybody was just very relaxed, which was shocking. Everybody was much calmer, much happier. It was bizarre, because I was like, Wow, this mask really was what was making all of these people mad. It was like people were just directly angry at me every time I went to work. I’ve been doing a lot of flying in and out of Florida these past few days, so I don’t know if that matters, but for the first time, the job has felt like what it was before COVID.

. . . We also kind of felt like it was time. Because at this point, people were coming on with the masks half on, and they were super annoyed if you were telling them to pull it back up. Definitely near the end it was worse, because people were just kind of tired of wearing the masks.

I think we can extrapolate from the flight attendant's remarks that people were angry because they knew from the start that the whole COVID thing was a charade, and the airlines and flight attendants had been tasked with being the tip of the spear in that theater of the Plebe War. The airlines became the prime movers in dropping the charade.

I feel bad for the guy at The New Republic, who sounds like he might even need to go into therapy to deal with people who are putting his health -- indeed, his life -- at risk by flying without masks. For some, it's going to be a hard process to get back to normal life.