Collateral Damage in the Mask Wars

Imagine the scene. You're an 18-year-old worker in one of those little local supermarkets. Let's say, for the sake of pathos and interest, a 5 foot nothing young woman. You're wondering what on earth grades you're gonna get at A Level in this weirdest of all summers and you've no idea what the job market is going to look like in the autumn or alternatively what university is going to imply. But you managed to convert your former part-time job to full-time, and it's only 7 quid an hour, and you've been exposing yourself to Covid 19 infection from customers since March, and Boris Johnson hasn't announced a pay rise for you and most people didn't put up rainbows for you, but at least you can make a contribution at home.

You've been in the shop since half five this morning, and amongst your jobs have been  dealing with respectively:

• cleaning a freezer,
• a 15 year old kid with his brother's ID who's trying to get booze,
• the group of youths who arrived together and didn't socially distance and whom you suspected were 
• someone who is angry that a local convenience shop doesn't stock tahini or agar jelly,
• trying to distract you while one of their mates tried to nick a bottle of whisky from behind your counter, 
• marking down hundreds of sandwiches, 
• and one poor soul who wandered in with their mask on back to front and wondered why it wasn't working. 

So it's just an ordinary day.

You're just at the end of your shift. You're knackered. You're dreaming of the home straight and a glass of whatever 18 year old shopworkers drink when they get home these days. You've pushed a trolley load of flour out to stock up the shelf, so you know you're going to go home looking like the Homepride Flour Monster. You look up. And, worst of all nightmares, it's a right-wing libertarian controversialist journalist. No mask on, grinning smug face, taking selfies to get "likes" from his (or her, but on this occasion his) weird fans on social media.

You could ask him to put a mask on. But then he's from a cossetted background - aren't all the edgy ones - and his father used to own a factory, so he's got hundreds of years of patronising the working classes behind him. You could call the manager. But she's 5 foot 2 and even if she were 6 foot 5, what's she going to do? Refuse to serve him? Irrelevant - he didn't come here to buy anything. He came here to show off. Throw him out? Then he's got a video and he's a martyr for the Dim Right Wing. Call the police? Seriously? 

So you ignore him. You hope that one day, he might grow up.

Unfortunately for you, at that very point a member of the opposite faction in the Mask Wars comes in. Takes a selfie of himself, resplendent in a mask emblazoned with the words "I am wearing a mask and I even have a slight tendency to hay fever." Sees the grinning idiot mask-less and demands to know what you are going to do about it.

You look up at the two of them, standing there. Shrug and go off to serve the bloke who's buying six Jaffa Cakes and eight cans of Stella for a big night in. And the masked avenger tells you if you don't do something about it, he's going to write to your Head Office, mention you specifically by name (you have a name badge. Just your first name, to ensure people don't have it too easy to track you down), but it'll do for identification purposes) and tell them that if, in future, you don't throw grinning manboys from the shop for non-wearing of masks, he is going to demand a boycott on Twitter.

It is unfair that weird libertarian show offs can bully people like this for their amusement and lols on Instagram. It is unfair to put the policing of weird libertarian show-offs into the hands of poorly-paid staff - predominantly young and female. It is wrong that the government put into place penalties so poor that it's not worth the police enforcing them. Penalties that the average libertarian right-wing show off could pay with pocket money from their dads. It you're going to penalise them for endangering human health - and remembering there are very good health reasons why some can't wear masks - penalise them so hard it hurts, and it makes the papers and the police think it's worthwhile.

And for the rest of us, it's tricky. You don't know whether a given person has a genuine reason not to wear a mask, or whether they've swallowed some drivel posted in Facebook and need to be educated. But if you can see the person concerned is a nearly-famous columnist, do us all a favour. Don't smack them in the face - it only makes them a mask martyr. Just mutter something mildly offensive under your breath from a distance of 2m. Tut, if you must. The only oxygen a mask would stop them receiving is the mask of publicity. So don't give it to them.

I wish I wasn't even writing this, but it's not about the idiot libertarians or the masked avengers. It's about the poor sods that work in shops and get caught in the crossfire. Don't make them collateral damage in the Mask Wars.

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