I remember in Glasgow, during the first week of lockdown and mask requirements, my daughter and I were wearing our masks while out on a walk. We were in and out of a shop for groceries, and didn't want to take the masks off until we got home and could do it properly. Of course, as we're walking down the sidewalk some jerk in a car stopped at a light shouts something inane over to us about "not going to catch that virus, are you ladies?" That's the worst hassling we ever really had about masks in the UK. There was the homeless guy who basically strafed us and the rest of the line waiting to go into Tesco by coughing all over us as we went by. And there were some shops that were putting the "distance" markers at 3 feet instead of 6 (Scotland was 6 while England was 3 for a while) on the floors, but who did enforce masking. But generally, although people were pretty bad about not wearing masks properly, they at least had them on and didn't give others much static for doing so. (Of course, our house movers, when they came to pack us up, weren't wearing masks as they should have been. But we were able to open all the windows and had a heck of a cross-ventilation going and we didn't have to argue about it. Besides, that was back in the day of the first Covid strain.)
Here we've been harassed in elevators. I've been "called out" while at a crowded festival for wearing a mask. People - mostly white old men of a particular type - have made it a point to do a lot of coughing in our presence. (Yes, I can tell a fake cough from a real one.) We took all the blankets to the laundromat ~today~ to give them a good wash before storing them for the summer. Some old geezer came in and sat five feet from my daughter and spent the hour pretty much coughing non-stop - with one of the fakest coughs I've ever heard, and an evil look on his face. The Daughter was just about to unload on him when the dryers finished, so I was spared having to listen to that tirade. Although it would have been entertaining, I'm sure, and absolutely not what geezerman was expecting.
We've both received some pretty evil stares from people who, in a different point in my life, I would have called "white trash" in stores - for a while it was pretty uniform behaviour in Walmart, and one of the reasons we rarely go in there. (Thank goodness for click-and-collect!) I guess they've all found something else to be vitriolic about now.... There's a specific type - we can pretty much call it before it happens. A generic meanness of expression. And generally of the "lower" socioeconomic classes (and not aware that they are). The Daughter excels at mad-dogging anyone who gives her a nasty stare. She can all but drill holes in steel with her stare.
So she now wards off a lot of the interactions before they start to become truly annoying.
Now it's primarily the institutional issues. While it hasn't happened to me (because it's not the nature of my job), I know people who are being forced back into the office after two highly productive years at home. They are government workers, for the most part. Apparently the economy of the areas of town near the government buildings just hasn't been the same without all that foot traffic, so the workers are being strong-armed back into the office by the governor's office. Several people I know have said, basically, "screw that" and put in for early retirement. No job is worth the morgue or an extended stay in a convalescent facility.
And still, the other day, I was in Macy's to do a click-and-collect. There was a particularly unpleasant woman (maskless) complaining about how bad the service was, and why didn't they have more people working the registers. She gave the poor guy at the till hell. Obviously she missed the whole thing - like, duh, pandemic? People not willing to risk their lives for minimum wage? (Then again, she struck me as the type of person who would be obnoxious if not treated like a princess regardless of the current state of the world. God forbid she had to wait in a four person line for like 10 minutes of her day.....)
So, yeah, humanity in general is not really high on my "esteemed" list right now. Since the start of the pandemic I've had two dead parents, one dead aunt, one dead cousin, one dead friend-from-school (none of whose funerals I could attend because of, yep, the C word), and several acquaintances being extremely ill (and not all of them are recovered yet). Except for the dead ones, every one of them reports being discounted - it's just not that bad, is it?- or ghosted completely by people they thought were friends. And by their employers. And "society" in general.
I can understand why medieval hermits lived the life they did, some days.
