Excuse Me If I’m Not Ready to Unmask

In Rob Reiner’s 1987 cult comedy, The Princess Bride, Fezzik asks the mysterious man in black a question as they scuffle atop the Cliffs of Insanity: “Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid or something like that?” “Oh no,” replies the masked stranger, secretly a humble stable boy. “It’s just that they’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.”

This quote, from one of the world’s most quotable movies, got passed around a lot last spring, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. You can even find it printed on a mask. More than a year later, the exchange has taken on added meaning. Why do we continue to wear masks, especially those of us who have been vaccinated (still less than half of the U.S. population)—despite the CDC’s announcement rolling back mask requirements in most public situations? Were we burned by acid or something? Maybe it just feels like we were.

Let’s not forget that for the first 10-plus months of this pandemic the country was led by a bizarrely compassion-free would-be autocrat seemingly incapable of uttering a sentence that did not contain at least one dangerous lie. Americans were put in the position of making personal decisions that had potential life-and-death consequences for every person we met and countless others we would never even see, based on information that was constantly shifting, typically self-contradictory, and far too often coming from dubious sources. We were told to inject bleach (or, even more confusingly, sunlight) into our bodies, and saw the seriousness of COVID-19 minimized. We watched a badly managed crisis shut down our most cherished public institutions, the places where we gather to learn from one another and share in the joy of living: schools, libraries, theaters, concert halls. Worst of all, we saw more than half a million of our fellow citizens—our mothers, fathers, grandparents, spouses, children, colleagues, and friends—die lonely and, in many cases, preventable deaths in overburdened hospitals staffed by medical workers haggard from exhaustion.