Texas is “opening up,” or so it’s being characterized, both by those enacting the measures (Gov. Greg Abbott) and those relaying the message (various media outlets from all over the spectra). The measures themselves are structured such that individual businesses will have to make the call on whether patrons must wear masks while inside the business and on how many customers to allow inside.
I’m not an expert on the coronavirus or on public policy, so take this with that context, but here are a few thoughts:
Sensible…Theoretically
Theoretically, these are sensible measures. Twelve months after lockdowns were first instituted in the United States, individuals have had enough time that we should understand the coronavirus and the risks it presents. Allowing people and businesses to decide for themselves what’s safe and unsafe should be more effective in balancing safety and livelihood than subjecting the state to a broad brush.
The problem, though, is that people aren’t doing this. They aren’t deciding what’s safe and unsafe.
People’s Motivations Are Tangential
By turning the coronavirus into a front on the culture war in which so many people in the country choose to participate, to varying extents, we’ve created an environment in which many people aren’t trying to decide what’s safe and unsafe. They’re doing what they think is the “right” thing to do, for reasons that aren’t based in information. Not everyone is doing this, of course, and there will be natural differences in risk tolerance/concern for other people’s lives. But the variety in response, and again, the lack of information contributing to so many responses, is larger than something that can be explained by risk tolerance. It’s sociopolitical. It’s the culture war.
Media Literacy Matters, and So Does Feeling Respected
There is an abundance of center-left, fact-based media. There is an abundance of left-wing media, often fact-optional. There is a small sliver of center-right, fact-based news, but there is no prominent center-right, fact-based opinion. There is an abundance of right-wing media, predominantly fact-optional.
This is a hard thing to prove. My impression’s based in part off of All Sides and Media Bias/Fact Check, two organizations that spend a lot of time trying to evaluate this stuff objectively. It’s also based on my own experience consuming media. The prevalence of the right-wing, fact-optional media has exploded in the last decade, with its most prominent purveyors dominating Facebook traffic on any given day.
It seems this may be in response to, again, the culture war—socially conservative Americans felt hated by center-left, fact-based media (while many in center-left, fact-based media felt hated in turn by socially conservative Americans) and looked for different options, and with few occupying that vast gap that should consist of center-right, fact-based media, they moved en masse to the right-wing, fact-optional parts of the spectra. Their friends and families often did too, encouraging groupthink extremism, and now you have massive swaths of America believing that, say, the 2020 election results were illegitimate despite dozens of court cases in which no evidence was produced indicating widespread fraud (or even much narrow fraud), let alone conspiracy to flip the election to Joe Biden.
There are lots of things that have driven this, but two, to me, seem to be the necessity of respect and the necessity of media literacy. Had social conservatives received more respect from center-left, fact-based media, and given more respect to the sorts of people working in center-left, fact-based media, they may not have turned in such large numbers away from truth. Were media literacy stronger in this country, millions fewer people would be falling for the fictions so prominent in right-wing media and prominent on the left-wing fringes. Of course, you’d still need to get people to care about truth (and many have shown they’d rather not), but if a larger portion of the populace was adept at discerning truth from falsehood on the internet, the gap between the information, or what passes for information, with which people would be making decisions would be smaller, and would likely provide more consensus on the reasonableness of things like wearing a mask at the grocery store or dining indoors.
Pity, of course, on the entity that tries to boost media literacy, because this is a bigger problem in middle-aged and older generations than it is in young adults (it’s still a problem with young adults, of course), and I, for one, struggle to conceive of the bones of an outreach effort that might be effective in reaching a group largely outside of the education portion of their lives. But this is an issue. A big, big issue.
People’s Motivations Aren’t Personal, and Neither Are the Consequences
The flaw in the “let people make their own decisions” rhetoric is often that people’s decisions are impacting others’ chances of survival. This is why we have drunk driving laws. Your risk tolerance may be different than your neighbor’s, but you can impose your risk tolerance upon them to an extent through your actions.
And then there is, again, the culture war. People are angry at those who take the coronavirus more or less seriously than they themselves are taking it. Sometimes, this anger is justified and based, again, in information. Oftentimes, it’s not. Oftentimes, it’s just the tribal hatred with a new arena in which to fight the battle. And so in addition to imposing their risk tolerance indirectly, they sometimes try to impose it rather directly.
This is a problem for Texas.
The governor just turned up the animosity dial by forcing this into people’s hands, and if the guy wearing a fishnet on his head while he berates the kid working the Panda Express takeout window is any indication, too many of those who disagree with a business’s mask policy or capacity decision, no longer state-ordered, will not handle the manner with respect or decency.
This is the reason for my biggest complaint about the governor’s announcement, which is that he surrounded it with political hype rather than communicating it in a responsible manner, outlining the risks and urging people to treat one another with respect. He could have kept his communication to, “Listen to the health experts, respect one another, but the state shouldn’t be controlling this any longer.” Instead, after the announcement he tweeted, “I just announced Texas is OPEN 100%. EVERYTHING. I also ended the statewide mask mandate.” That’s not going to help the respect piece of this.
This Stinks for Businesses
Gone is the cover for businesses, with many now threatened with boycotts no matter where they land on masks and capacity. They’re on their own now on that front, and the business incentives do not point toward sober, clear-minded examinations of what’s safe and unsafe and how to use that information to best balance safety and livelihood. The playing field has been altered in such a way as to encourage extremism, crowding out the moderates among us the same way media often does.
This Also Stinks for Individuals
For many, going to the grocery store is now going to be less safe than it was. Or, they’ll have to find a new grocery store. And while that might be easy for most of the people who have time on their hands to read blog posts like this one, that’s not going to be easy for a lot of people who are less well-off, less advantaged, and have poorer healthcare access in the event they do become ill.
We’ll see how it goes.
