It will take a long time, maybe forever, for people to get over face-diapering trauma. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
Many of us who never got dragooned to kill or be killed in the rice paddies of Vietnam now have an inkling of what PTSD means.
After a year of being remote-imprisoned, denied interaction and denied service all of a sudden, everything is kinda-sorta opening up. One feels as if one has been let out of prison.
Which is exactly what has happened. Only we were never convicted of anything.
It feels weird to just walk into stores again – after nearly a year of not being able to.
The same stores that were closed – to the sane – as recently as a few weeks ago. The stores where you had to walk past a gantlet of threatening signs – No Diaper, No Entry! – and had to gird yourself for the possibility of an attack (verbal, usually – physical, possibly) by a sickness psychotic enraged by your failure to “practice” sickness kabuki.
Even if that didn’t materialize, the sight of Face-Effaced Freaks everywhere – even alone, in their cars – had become so oppressive one stopped being aware of just how much. After months and months of it, unrelenting.
What was funny, initially, morphed into sad and then, angry.
Eventually, it just became incredibly depressing. To know how sick the country had become.
You didn’t want to see it anymore, much less deal with it. So you stayed home even if you didn’t have to.
It is unnerving to see people whose faces you cannot see. You cannot read people when you cannot see their faces. You naturally wonder what is wrong with them – and what they are up to.
