I went on the bus to downtown yesterday morning (in my paper mask like they Mandate us, only, cheeky old me, I didn’t cover my nose). Dentist appointment (the counter lady made me cover my nose), a checkup, bad news; I need expensive work and my money flow is not what it was in the old days a year and a half ago. Because my part-time job – at our beautiful concert hall, a job I loved and it loved me – is all gone now, never to return. Oh they promise once again that maybe, just maybe, the UBC campus will have actual students on it in September and our hall will be allowed to have actual patrons, maybe 50, maybe even 100 in our 1200 seat hall. Woopee. Yay. So there may be shifts employing 3 or four of us.
And I’ll try to work a shift for six hours with the mask over my mouth and nose. And if I find that the lack of oxygen and the excess of carbon dioxide after sweaty hours in this mask will prove too much for me it will be decision made. I’ll be gone. And I’ll leave the place that was so alive for me and my friends for 19 years. And our beautiful hall that was so alive with culture and music will be a zombie of its former self because THEY are never going to let us go – that’s my conclusion. If somebody who doesn’t even have to show up on camera can make everybody in this fair land from the youngest kid to the oldest codger have to ask permission to breath freely we are all in zombie-land for good and all.
What did I see when I got off the bus yesterday and walked two or three blocks to the dentist office? I saw the people all walking in formation six feet apart from each other. It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All of our bodies have been snatched. We all get a reward for putting paper or cloth breath restricting germ collectors over our mouths and noses. We get perks for slowly suffocating ourselves in any and every indoor space and shutting up and complying and not making one tiny little objection to this zombie-land permanent regime. We get to not be arrested.
My dental hygienist had the mask over her face of course. And I have to remind my petulant self that she wears this thing for all of her seven hour shift. I remarked on that and she offered a hope that the restrictions will soon be eased. I said I am losing my faith that they (“THEY") will ever let us go. I could hear her sigh of resignation. My dentist examined me with a mask and a plastic shield on. I know they have to do these things or they’ll be shut down. They have to believe it’s all for science and all for our health and safety. They don’t have the luxury that I do to know it’s all political.
None of the store keepers and shop keepers and restauranteurs have that luxury. They don’t have the luxury of knowing and speaking the truth or of even believing that there is anything wrong. They have to make a living. They know that the police are sending plainclothes officers around to check up on their compliance, check whether they are having their employees order their customers to put the mask up over their noses.
So I have to hold on to reality all by myself. I have to get real about it. Shooting off my mouth to people about how the mask is unhealthy and the jabs are unsafe and the lockdowns are killing us all six ways from Sunday, what’s that going to do? It’s going to make people angry because I’m threatening their livelihood. I’m threatening their very quiet, semi-conscious, desperate, bloody-fingers clinging on to faith and hope that normality will return any day now.
But old history bug me, I think this is The Duration, as in World War Two on the Home Front. That Duration Number Two was six years long, from 1939 to 1945. Global Totalitarianism was beaten back then. It’s back for Duration Number Three. And we, my fellow targets, are only half way through Year Two.