I order you to sit down

When I was a kid in the 1970s, we had a game we played at Ed Smith elementary school that we thought was hilarious. When someone was about to sit down (usually at lunch), we’d shout “I ORDER YOU TO SIT DOWN!!”. The poor sucker who was about to sit down had two choices: he could sit down and let you be the boss of him, or he could look like a bozo while he tried to eat his lunch standing up. He couldn’t really win either way. By the time we got to Levy Junior High School it had fallen out of vogue, and if you’d tried it at Nottingham high school you’d have probably gotten punched in the head for it. But when we were in grade school, it was high comedy.

I’d like to think that now, as an adult, if someone were to yell “I ORDER YOU TO SIT DOWN” while I was on my way to a comfortable seated position of my choice, I’d just roll my eyes and sit anyway.

Is Andrew Cuomo a jackass? Yes. Does he represent the worst of the paternalism of his party? Indeed. Would he like to slowly get you used to obeying The Government, asking permission for the smallest of liberties? Why yes, yes he would.

But...I wear a mask, because it’s the right thing to do. It protects me a little, and others (if I were to get infected), a lot. It is obvious that it makes a huge difference in spread of COVID (see Prague, for example), probably the biggest difference of anything we’ve tried so far. COVID doesn’t kill a huge percentage of the people it infects, but it kills plenty, and cripples others. Even if all that happens to you is you permanently lose your senses of smell and taste...isn’t that still kind of a big deal? Is never being able to climb a flight of stairs really something you want to risk, for yourself or others, just because you’d still be alive?

If someone handed you a parachute on your way out of an airplane at 10,000 feet, would you say “there has never been a controlled study that conclusively proves parachutes protect you falling out of an airplane”? (there hasn’t been, btw) or would you grab it and use it because its efficacy is obvious?

As for me (a scientist), I am going to wear a mask, at least until vaccines (yay!) have put this pandemic in our rearview mirror. “They” may be telling me to wear one, but as I learned as a child, it’s not worth spending my whole lunch period on my feet, just to prove someone’s not the boss of me. And there’s a whole lot more at stake now than just looking like a bozo.

Now's our chance

When I was a kid, I had an experience that white, able-bodied Christian kids all over the country have had since 1945 or so. When I learned about the Holocaust, I got to wonder how I would have behaved if I’d been there. Jewish kids didn’t get to wonder, they knew what they’d have been doing. Black kids, disabled kids, and lots of other groups didn’t wonder. They knew. But the people who were different from the Nazis only in ideology (we hoped) got the privilege of wondering. Would I have supported the concentration camps, worked in them, ratted out my Jewish neighbors and stolen their property, smashed windows on Kristallnacht, dragged men, women, and children out of their cars and beaten them? No way. Would I have marched in Nazi parades? No, of course not. Would I have sat idly by while the Nazis marched, shouting about racial purity? Nope. Would I have hidden escaping Jews in my house, spending my life savings to save the lives of children and get them to safety? Of course! I read the diary of Ann Frank. The people who hid her were heroes, and I imagined myself at LEAST as heroic as that, if not maybe more so. I’d have spoken out against the Nazi bastards every chance I got, and not tolerated that unpatriotic evil for a moment. Some of us got the privilege of imagining what we’d have been like. How we'd act. Well, guess what? God help us all, we don’t have to wonder any more. Fucking Nazis with fucking swastikas – the same people most of my father’s generation, including many from my own family, signed up to fight and kill in the name of the United States of America – are marching on college campuses, shouting about racial purity. They are committing terrorist acts like driving cars into crowds, using violence, not just free speech, to further their evil agendas. People of color, jews, the disabled…they don’t have the privilege to decide where they stand on this issue. This is a war against them. They don’t get to murmur vague comments about “violence on all sides” and go back to their iced latte. They don’t get to ignore racist flags flying on neighbors’ houses because “they have a lot going on right now”. But I, and millions who look like me, get that privilege. We can decide. When you were young and knew goddamn well what you SHOULD do, you imagined how you’d act. If the way you’re acting (or not acting) now is significantly different from that, it’s not too late. Remember the disgust we had for those who had stood by in the ‘30s? Remember how the sheer absurdity of the notion that WE might someday ignore actual evil marching through our streets made us laugh out loud?? Now is our chance. Let’s not be the people whose tolerance of evil made us sick as a child. We get to choose how we respond. Let’s choose not to have future generations of children sneer at the memory of our cowardice.