Tonight I went to Target for the first time in months. Just inside the door, approximately 5 yards from the sign saying "Masks required for store entry," there was a little knot of college-aged women. Two of them were wearing masks; the third, facing me and laughing uproariously as she snapped pictures of her friends, had hers around her chin. "Excuse me," I said in my politest friendliest voice, "could you put your mask on, please?"
"Oh," she answered as she complied, in a tone that made me think she had just forgotten.
When I got back to the front of the store to check out, there was a line. I stood there, zoning out, until I was startled by a masked face right next to mine. "Are you the lady who asked me to put my mask on earlier?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, blinking in surprise.
"Well," she said, with a bit of a quiver in her voice, "in the future you should think about ordering your stuff online, because it's my choice whether to wear a mask."
"Oh," I said, in the politest friendliest voice you ever heard, "or you could comply with the posted requirements." Conveniently, a register opened up and I walked over to it before she said anything else.
It will come as no surprise to you, dear patient readers, that I am still struggling a bit with the whole Cultural Norms in the Age of COVID thing. It is a true fact that gentle social pressure influences mask use in both directions. Ten days ago I wore a mask to a small gathering of church folks. One friend saw me and said aloud, "Oh, you're wearing a mask, so I will too," whereupon another person said, "I'll get my mask too." Result: 100% of people at that get-together wearing masks. But five days ago I was at a gathering of eight people where the opposite result ensued when one person said, "Does anybody care if I don't wear a mask? I can't deal with the way it fogs my glasses." This launched a string of complaints about masks accompanied by near-universal mask removal.
So I am going to keep applying gentle social pressure, mostly by example but occasionally by means of polite friendly direct requests. Clearly, though, my request did not feel sufficiently polite or friendly to the person at Target tonight. I am trying to think what could have induced me, at age 20, to march up to someone my mother's age and tell her she should just stay home if she really wanted other people to follow the rules. I am trying to sympathize with her and coming up empty: if I had a health condition that made it uncomfortable for me to wear a mask, I would not dawdle at the entrance, taking pictures of my friends and laughing in a way that seems likely to spray respiratory droplets at entering shoppers.
And yet-- I know also that one of my least attractive traits is my tendency to be stringent about rules, to value being right above all else. The god made in my image, à la Voltaire, is a god that prizes regulations and compliance. Striving to grow in faith means turning away from that particular idol, day after day, to fix my gaze on the actual Author and Perfecter of the faith. What does God ask of me in the pandemic? To protect the vulnerable, yes, and also to extend compassion to folks who don't seem to approach that task in the same way or with the same degree of concern.
Which means that my brain remains a messy place to be, here in month 7 of the pandemic. I think it will probably be a while before I go back to Target.
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