I’d hide my face too

I saw it on the back of a man’s black T-shirt at what could have been any freedom rally in America — sun-bleached flags snapping in the wind, boots in the grass, the low hum of truth rising like static in the air. His shirt said, “I don’t judge mask wearers. If I was going along with a plan to destroy the economy, and millions of lives, I’d hide my face too.” I stopped cold. Because in two sentences, he said what three years of propaganda never could: that the masks were never really about health — they were about shame.

When I still see masked travelers today — the handful scattered through airports and airplane aisles like leftover relics of a bad religion — I feel something between sadness and disbelief. Out of 320 passengers, maybe ten are still covering their faces, clinging to the last vestiges of fear, unable to let go of the performance. How do you not look around and see? No one’s dying. No one’s coughing. The world didn’t end. The only thing contagious now is cowardice.

We were the ones they called deplorables — the ones mocked for questioning, for refusing to kneel before “The Science” that changed its mind every thirty days. We were told we were selfish, stupid, uneducated, conspiracy theorists, murderers of grandmothers. Meanwhile, it was the “educated class” — the obedient, the rule-followers, the ones desperate for approval — who rolled up their sleeves and shut down their neighbors’ businesses. They nodded solemnly while the media told them what to fear next, and they covered their faces like penitents in a cult of compliance.

The tragedy is that this wasn’t new. It was textbook mass psychology. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil — the way ordinary people commit unspeakable acts not because they’re monsters, but because they’re obedient. Stanley Milgram went farther with his obedience experiments at Yale: large numbers of people will shock others to the point of harm if an authority figure tells them it’s okay. COVID simply gave that old darkness a new mask.

Those who resisted were ridiculed, censored, even fired. But it wasn’t because they were wrong — it was because they were free. Free people don’t wear the symbols of submission. They don’t pretend obedience is virtue. They don’t outsource moral responsibility to unelected bureaucrats and call it compassion. They stand barefaced in the storm, even when the wind cuts their skin.

The rest went along. They wore the mask because it was easier. Because confrontation was uncomfortable. Because being accepted mattered more than being right. And now, years later, when the truth is out — when even the CDC quietly admits masking did almost nothing, when the NIH walks back its claims, when the emails are public and the narrative is in tatters — they keep wearing them. Out of habit, out of guilt, out of the deep human need to avoid the mirror.

They say virtue signaling, but it’s really shame signaling. It’s a way of saying: please don’t make me face what I did. The mask covers more than a mouth; it conceals conscience. It hides the face of those who watched small businesses die, children fall behind, and families fracture — all because they were told it was the right thing to do.

When history writes this chapter — and it will — it won’t be kind to the masked. Not because they feared a virus, but because they feared ridicule more than tyranny. Because they lacked the moral courage to say no. The irony is that those who were mocked as selfish turned out to be the ones preserving selfhood itself — the stubborn few who remembered that freedom, like oxygen, only matters when you can breathe it freely.

So when I see the stragglers — the masked few still shuffling through airports and grocery stores like ghosts of lockdowns past — I don’t feel anger anymore. I feel pity. Because if I had gone along with the lies, if I had traded truth for comfort, if I had participated in the destruction of livelihoods and liberty, I suppose I’d hide my face too.

They hid their faces. We kept ours.

And history will remember who stood barefaced in the storm.

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Image: Pixnio