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May 26, 2020

In a viral video, a supermarket mob rampages against a woman

By Andrea Widburg

On Monday morning, people woke up to a video on Twitter showing masked customers in a Staten Island grocery store screaming obscenities at a woman without a mask and shouting at her to "get out."  It's an alarming video because it shows how quickly people can be turned into human weapons when fear powers them.

McAuley Holmes, who identifies himself as someone whose viewpoint comes from the left, found the video on Reddit and posted it on Twitter Sunday night as a curiosity.  By Monday morning, because it had gone viral, he was asking, "Should people engage in this type of social pressure to enforce mask-wearing or social distancing as a community?"

For those of us fortunate enough to live in places without Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, the dynamic duo that gave New York one of the worst mortality rates in the world, it's hard to understand the panic those people are feeling.  However, on Staten Island alone, almost 950 people have died from the China virus.

Nevertheless, to the extent that the mob members are wearing masks and believe in a mask's efficacy, their visceral fear seems unwarranted.  They, after all, are safe.  It's the unmasked woman who is at risk should any viral particles be floating in the air.

Showing again the political divide in America, the people who were pleased that mask-wearing is becoming a socially enforced norm pretty obviously came from the left:

Given conservatives’ general resistance to masks, there was the usual "Trump and his followers are racist KKK supporters."  Never mind that the KKK was the military arm of the Democrat Party:

There was also an ironic surge of support for private businesses making decisions about what they will and will not accept.  As the example below shows, the same people arguing for private enterprise freedom regarding masks are the ones who believe that the government should force Christians to bake gay "wedding" cakes.  Thus, OG Sharpton supports letting stores force customers to wear masks:

A few years ago, though, OG Sharpton opposed a business owner refusing to make a cake:

Conservative commentators felt that a screaming mob chasing someone out of a store is both un-American and irrational:

One person thought leftists, who support the mob's "wear the ask just in case" mentality, could learn a lesson from this video:

At my local Walmart, in a region that the China virus affected only lightly, the store sets a limit on the number of people allowed inside but does not enforce masks.  Employees technically have masks on, but many have pulled them down so they cover only their mouths, or they've pulled them off entirely.

About 50% of the customers at my Walmart are black.  A month ago, when it emerged that blacks were succumbing more frequently to the virus, probably 50% of those black customers showed up in masks.  Around 30% of white customers wore masks.

However, when I was in Walmart a few days ago, only 20% or so of the customers, whether black or white, were wearing masks.  Outside the New York charnel house, people are finding it impossible to maintain a steady diet of fear and hysteria.  They're disinfecting their shopping cart handles, washing their hands well, and going around life as usual — without any spike in cases.  My county does not even bother to list cases anymore on its webpage.

As for what I think, all I can say is that mobs terrify me.  They are the mindless rage of frightened or angry people, and they will always do more harm than good.

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