I’m trying to understand, in Romans 7 and Mockingbird terms, a phenomenon I currently observe — and feel — all around me. It is as if the more control, medically and in terms of hospitalizations, that we are getting over COVID19, the more insistent and pressing are the visible measures a good citizen is supposed to be taking against it. To put it another way, as the actual threat is decreasing, the things I am supposed to be doing in order to be regarded as a good citizen in relation to it, are increasing.
So Mrs. Zahl and I take a walk on the shoreline near where we live, and the beach is not crowded at all — just several knots of two persons walking near the edge of Long Island Sound on a windy day — and yet half the people, especially the younger half, are wearing masks the whole time. The wind is billowing and there is at least 50 feet between almost every “bubble” of two, yet still masks are tightly on.
And I feel badly, like I’m doing something wrong, so I put on my mask; or, if I don’t, walk by the masked duos with my head bowed and my eyes downcast. There’s some kind of first-class versus second-class citizen thing going on, and I’m back in East Berlin, say around 1958. A former STASI informant once told me that about 45 % of the East German population was spying on the other 55 %, and that she had to submit formal reports on all her neighbors every two weeks — their habits, their idiosyncrasies, and especially their comings and goings.
Is it maybe an analogy to St. Paul, where he talks about sin increasing as a result of the law? Like maybe, the burden of visible good citizenship increases to the extent that the actual need to do so is decreasing. I don’t know quite how to put it, but something is going on.
At the end of the cast, I talk a little about minorities of one and the peril of a situation when everyone you know and every institution you know is against one voice — even if that voice is wrong and the forces against it are right. Something about the way the universe or Reality compensates in favor of the “You and Me Against the World” (Helen Reddy, 1974) could be happening. Sometimes mass judgments boomerang. If I felt as strongly as some of my friends feel this week, I would probably adopt an august silence, trusting the truth to come out. It’s just a thought, though, and probably applies to both sides of every competition.
LUV U.
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