New Challenges For Travelers

There is a remote chance that I will return this year for a visit to the country of my birth. That would be America, specifically California. Six years have passed since my last visit, and it appears to me that the situation on the ground has changed dramatically. The changes have not run in favor of an easy and comfortable trip.

The new COVID variant, Omicron, is statistically significant and obviously dangerous. Every day, people are contracting the disease. People are being admitted into the hospital. Most impressively, people are dying. In spite of that obvious threat level, I don’t see a lot of masking going on. Instead, I hear a lot of yelling about not wanting to wear masks, and freedom, and you can’t tell me what to do, and take off that mask you fucking commie. Has any work been done about the possibility that COVID has a potential psychological impact? Subtle, perhaps, but acting to make sufferers irritable and unreasonable?

If, indeed, I do travel to the indispensable country this year, I will be masking. Probably double masking. I have seen examples of masked people being accosted in retail establishments or travel situations for having the freedom-hating temerity to wear a mask. As though, perhaps, the only possible explanation could be that the masked individual was a libtard, or under the spell of ex-President Obama and his puppet, Joe Biden. I have formulated a strategy to use if I am faced with this behavior in a convenience store or something.

My play will be to feign weakness, cough into the mask, and say in an unsteady tone, “I’m sorry. I was in Africa for six months (cough) and my doctor thinks that I was exposed to Ebola. He says I must wear (long, wet, wheezing cough) this mask to protect (cough) other people.” (Reaches out to lean on something, holding chest and coughing.) “Oh, shit! I forgot my rubber gloves!”

It was a lot of fun to run this strategy past a couple of friends of mine, but I know that in reality it would only make someone want to shoot me. A lot of the unreasonable Americans are now strapped.