My parents have resumed their usual habit of wintering in Florida with hundreds of thousands of other retired Canadians who’ve had enough of winter living. Recently, my dad told how he went to a meeting of the local camera club and was the only one wearing a mask. They met in an enclosed space. They didn’t enforce any distancing protocols. Meanwhile, the news tells of omicron ripping its way through European countries as a portent of things to come in North America. But people in Florida have had enough of Covid-19 protocols and all the accompanying talk of vaccinations. They want to get on with their lives the way they lived them back at the beginning of 2020. And so my dad sat by himself, masked and triple vaxxed.
My dad’s account offers an interesting reversal of an already interesting reversal in the narratives people tell about mandated protocols. Here, in Toronto, where vaccination rates are some of the highest in the world (86.2 % fully vaccinated among those aged 12 and up) the anti-vaxxers take to the streets, marching through the downtown core every Saturday and telling onlookers to stop being sheeple, to start thinking for themselves. (I call this an interesting reversal because, before the pandemic, the same protesters insisted on wearing masks because they feared government surveillance.)
The situation in Florida illustrates a further reversal. When the anti-vaxxers dominate the public discourse, they lose the advantage of their usual arguments. They can’t accuse people like my dad of being sheeple anymore. And they can’t say that he isn’t thinking for himself because, obviously, he’s asserting his independence of thought when he’s the only one choosing to wear a mask.
Context is everything. In the context of an unmasked majority, we see them clearly for what they are: people who have cast aside all pretense of argument and will do what they want to do for no other reason than that they want to do it. But we can’t very well call this libertarianism, can we? Not when everyone is doing it. I’m more inclined to call it sheepleism.
