How We Fill In the Gray Areas

It's about COVID, but also not really about COVID.

I’ve been holing up in a lake house with not much else to do than walk on trails and go grocery shopping for the bulk of the pandemic. My only connection to the outside world has been small hangs, group Zooms, and people yelling on Twitter.

But after nine or so months of a pandemic, I’ve have had a few outings where things weren’t as safe as I would have liked, but it felt awkward to say something at the time – what I thought was a barbecue with a couple of people was actually four or five, or an “outdoor” dinner that ended up being in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble. In spite of my guilt, I know these minor failings don’t immediately mean I’ve been doomed to murder thousands of grandmothers, but it doesn’t make me feel particularly good, either – as if my COVID purity has been tarnished, at least until the next couple of tests come back negative.

But while people on Twitter and elsewhere desperately plead for us to stay home and stop our hospitals from overflowing, so many people aren’t listening, and there are no meaningfully enforced rules to stop them, anyway. Without actual rules and laws that are fairly enforced, reasonable people are left with no choice but to beg, plead, shame, and moralize in the hopes that other people put on a damn mask. Not only does this not work, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of any one individual to shame an entire country into caring about other people.

In a functional society, we’d have rules in place to at least stop the bleeding: no indoor dining, mandatory mask wearing indoors, testing and quarantine after air travel, a limit on private gatherings. But in the absence of clear rules, we are all forced to take our own moral calculations, which, on the whole, are almost always inadequate (it’s like when someone says they’d rather donate to charity than pay taxes – and then pat themselves on the pack for donating $50 to a food bank once a year). The average person rarely wants to give as much as they owe to society, and the average person seems swayed more by the culture that surrounds them than the data or rules that suggest otherwise. And when the average person is left to determine what is safe and unsafe for them, bad shit happens for everyone else.

I’m not here to argue over the effectiveness or appropriateness of shaming culture around COVID – but more that it is an inevitable result of a chasm between rules and how they are enforced. And when the rules or their enforcement do not adequately meet the needs of the time, people will fill in the gap with shaming. This results in some of us feeling guilty for an extra trip to the grocery store, while other people are having regular outings to their local Olive Garden and literal orgies (hopefully not in succession, but hey – it’s your ass).

I don’t think this pandemic is the first time we’ve seen a lack of clear laws or enforcement cause a system of shaming to serve in its place. Our own justice system has shown itself to be inadequate for solving many modern problems – sexual assault, domestic violence, harassment, and abuses of power only rarely result in any official kind of punishment – but the culture has swooped in to try to do what the legal system has failed to do: hold people accountable. This is not a perfect, or an evenly applied justice system, but it fills the holes where the real system has failed us. It’s the best we’ve got, and it isn’t great.

Our laws are an ideal for how we see ourselves – that all men are created equal, stealing is bad, and adults shouldn’t have sex with children – and yet our enforcement of those rules, our justice system, is what shows us who we really are as a society. In those cases, we see a justice system that claims to be fair while punishments vary wildly based on race, wealth, or power status. In the case of COVID, it is the CDC telling us to stay home and avoid travel, all while planes are allowed to be full and bars and restaurants are mostly open. A total discrepancy between rules and enforcement forces in-group norms to emerge as the dominant system of reward and punishment, and can be completely arbitrary to the point where it renders even the most diligent efforts ineffective on a national scale. While many of my young, healthy friends are spending the holidays diligently alone, there are elderly people cavorting around unmasked in Florida bars drinking red wine with ice – and honestly, they deserve to die for that alone.*

But what this really comes down to is the chasm between rules and enforcement, and what happens when that chasm is too great. What happens when our legal system is inadequate for identifying and punishing rape and sexual assault? Victims are left with no choice but to seek their own kind of justice, both inside and outside our current legal system. It makes me wonder if cancel culture would even exist if we had a system of justice that met the needs of our current time. I often wonder how we could do better than this system that was created by old, dead, white men and enforced by people who have taken their word as gospel.

Our laws might reflect our ideals, but how we enforce them reveals who we actually are. This pandemic has made our collective nature painfully obvious to anyone who’s looking, but it certainly didn’t start there.

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*Yes, I do actually think people who put ice in red wine deserve to die. I don’t care if they’re kind. I long to be canceled for this and this alone.