Who Was That Unmasked Man?
Finally the mask mandates are dropped for air travel (and trains and buses). On longer flights you sat there for five hours or more breathing your own exhaust. Or you practiced “actively eating and drinking” for several hours. The flight attendants aren’t police and have enough to worry about without checking to see if a mask is covering someone’s nose.
Historically, disrespect for one law, no matter how minor, escalates to disrespect for more and more laws. If the police stopped everyone driving over the speed limit, the highways would be parking lots. If the IRS sued everyone who cheated to any degree on their taxes, the courts would be clogged and the jails filled.
The question is, where do you draw the line? You can’t have people killing each other in the streets, but we did allow rioters under the guise of social protest to rob stores and vandalize restaurants. We allowed the middle of the city in Portland to be turned into an anarchist pit. (I believe the mayor of Portland and the city council are guilty of crimes.)
The more onerous the laws, and the more people feel they are unjust or unreasonable, the more they will be broken, leading to even more laws broken. Covid is now clearly endemic. The decision to allow people to decide how to protect themselves is a wise one. We don’t need Big Brother telling us how to lead our lives, especially when Big Brother has proven so fallible over the past three years or so.
