Confronting the Refusal to Mask with Church Members

If you need help making sense out of COVID-19 getting worse by the day, I found something that might help.

Whenever natural disasters happen, the official response, despite generations of evidence to the contrary, is to assume two things: 

1. The public is going to panic.
2. The only way to control that public panic is an outpouring of violence.

In reality, the ingrained public response is compassion, a desire to help, and the decision to mobilize without being asked. Laypeople in communities come together to start putting their lives back together as a natural response to disaster almost immediately. The biggest obstacle the public faces in those efforts tends to be officials purposefully getting in their way. Officials panicking, and assuming the public will panic if they see the truth for themselves, ends up causing the very panic they're trying to avoid.

This is called "elite panic," and it's a well-studied trauma response from people in leadership. The ones who panic in a situation, and who end up doing the most damage through their panicking, are wealthy elites who don't know how to respond to chaos and misfortune.

This not only explains why the immediate reaction to COVID-19 was so bad, it also explains why the response for so many isn't getting any better after almost a year passing. Anyone who studies human resiliency will tell you that's not normal. 

I have a theory that our hunkering down and trying to protect ourselves through isolation is part of why this is happening. In a situation where we all want to naturally come together and comfort each other, we just can't do that in-person. For the generation of folks who don't understand how to use the tools to come together virtually, their circumstances have placed them into a situation where not being able to help means they can't heal. 

Am I suggesting we throw caution to the wind and come together and risk infecting one another? Absolutely not. But we need to find other ways of helping each other. Instead of focusing on everyone else we believe to be the problem, we need to become part of the solution.

At the risk of sounding Very Mormon, the people in our lives who are refusing to mask up and take this seriously need someone to serve. If they're ever going to get out of the selfish feedback loops from watching too much Fox News and spending too much time on Facebook, they need to be helping to make things better. 

The next time you see our hear one of your relatives complaining about wearing masks, don't fight with them. Don't accuse them of not caring or being the problem. Ask them what they've done to help someone else. Challenge them to do it. Our friends, family members, and neighbors may be Republicans who have been taken in by the most corrupt incarnation of the GOP that has ever existed, but they're still Mormons. They need reminding of what that means, what that looks like.

In hurricane cleanup, it meant going into people's yards to remove fallen trees, tarping roofs, and giving people needed supplies. Those needs are no less dire now that record numbers of people are unemployed or underemployed, people are running out of money, and more will die.

The best time to have gotten the COVID-19 response right would've been a year ago when it first landed in our country. The second best time is now. It's not too late to start doing better with masking and social distancing. It's not too late to do the right thing. Part of doing the right thing is honoring the long standing tradition of finding someone to help—especially if they're having a worse time of things than you are.

If the Mormons in your life have forgotten that tradition, don't be afraid to remind them.