Kia ora Koutou,
I’ve been thinking about my (and other people’s) reluctance to wear masks. I wear them of course when I have to but it still feels like I’m doing something very strange.
I mean, where do we see masks? On bank robbers, burglars, Halloween (hate these ones), sometimes in a film or a play. Yes I know nurses and doctors et al wear masks but that seems okay because its part of their job and they taken them off when they finish work so only their patients and colleagues see them.
We rely so much on seeing faces, judging expressions, state of health, happiness, sadness, hunger, pain and all the others. We don’t always need to ask to understand how someone is feeling, we can see it on their face. We gather a lot of information from faces. As children we learn to guage how a parent is feeling. Are they in a good mood? Or a bad one? Are they sad, happy, angry, determined, sober, not sober? We read ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ and join the audience to see that creepy ‘Phantom of the Opera’ – masks mean trouble and anxiety, right?
We often judge innocence or guilt by the expression on someone’s face. We say, ‘You can tell by his face, he’s guilty all right’, when in fact he might just have a headache, be scared, hungry or guilty about something else entirely. We are a judgemental lot – look at the vicious posts put up on FB about that poor family whose members have covis. I bet if those people who posted those insults had their own situations blazoned across FB they might not be so ready to make hasty, totally unfair and untrue judgements about others. In this case the family is, apparently, Pasifika, and that, it seems, was enough to add racist fuel to the fire of total ignorance mixed with stupidity.
Covid can happen to anyone. It can happen to you, it can happen to me. None of us is immune. It can happen to someone of any age. Old people appear to be more vulnerable but there’s plenty of evidence, worldwide, to show that it can affect and kill all age groups. It can happen whether you wear a mask or whether you don’t although wearing a mask does create some sort of barrier and it stops you infecting others and them infecting you. Think about that. Its no good being ‘holier than thou’ – won’t make a blind bit of difference to Covid.
I’m wearing a mask as I write this, one of a bunch a friend gave me, and of course feeling virtuous as hell, which is not a good thing because when I feel virtuous I might make judgements, might get snappy and say, they’re not wearing a mask, they are not as good as me, they are going to infect someone, they should be growled at, exposed, told they’re killers, that they deserve to be shunned and left to rot – saying in fact that you have be like me, good, and if you’re not, you’re bad. You’re not worthy of kindness, you don’t deserve respect..
We are pretty good at pointing the finger at others, not so good at seeing our own faults. There have been some vitriolic posts on FB about the family whose members have Covid and quite rightly these vicious posters have been called to account by Dr Bloomfield and Minister Chris Hipkins. I’m not sure those who p[osted these lies are the kind who would worry about that although the one who put the original post up which these people then moulded, rearranged and added their own vicious judgements to, is feeling very ashamed. The ones who posted have not yet revealed themselves. I suppose for people who don’t have a lot of power the feeling that they have some on Facebook is quite exhilarating. If they don’t like people with different coloured skins then they get a lovely self–righteous pleasure in expressing their views although the fact that they were based on a blatant untruth which they then embroidered and rearranged seems to have escaped their notice. Who cares about the truth if you can get a thousand likes?
Once upon a time kids walking to school hurled insults at each other based on whether they were Protestant or Catholic, whether they were Pakeha or Maori, whether they were a girl or a boy, fat or thin, short or tall, disabled or physically perfect. Human beings are incurably inventive – if we decide we’re going to hate someone, or a race, or a gender or a transgender, then we are extremely inventive at finding ways to do it and hugely imaginative at finding justification for those actions and words.
When the PM says be kind, she means you, she means me. She doesn’t mean it can be part time either, she means full time. She doesn’t mean ‘Oh I wouldn’t say this to anyone else but…’, she doesn’t mean ‘well, you know what that lot is like’ or ‘she’s always been selfish’ or ‘he’s a bludger, that sort always are’.
So be kind for your own sake, and for mine, because I’m part of the cohort that’s seen as a ‘waste of space’. Sure, you can get annoyed, angry, fed up with other people’s idiocy or what you see as that, but don’t swirl that natural irritation into vicious denunciation. Please.
Its become trite to say we’re all in this together but trite or not, its true. Your anxiety is my anxiety and mine is yours. We play with whatever cards we’re dealt darlings – race, gender, age, disability, physical condition, money or no money, education or not much education – we can only play our hands with the cards we’re dealt. No doubt yours are superior to mine, or vice versa, but let’s just chill, huh?
If a little voice in your head is saying ‘just shut the fuck up and be kind,’ that’s probably me… I’ve never been much good at sweet talk when a command will do the trick. Its why I am never any good in discussion groups. But in future I will be kind to those who like discussion groups. I might think I could tell them what to do and get it done in five minutes instead of discussing it for five hours and not coming to a conclusion, but – I won’t say it. Kindness rules okay?
Renée
