My empathy erosion

I have stopped being worried for people who refuse to protect themselves from COVID, and that's a bad thing.

Fan madness in the time of COVID.

I’m not what you would call a crazed football fan, but I’ve always enjoyed watching a game or two on Saturdays and Sundays in the Fall.  I love watching Army play, of course, and it’s great that their games have found their way onto some of the, shall we say, lesser cable channels.  It’s been a couple of years since I was up there at the old Highland Home for a game.  A crisp fall weekend in 2019 when Tracy and I drove up for my 50th Reunion weekend was the last time, and it was glorious:  the Hudson River valley was aglow with oranges and yellows, and the stadium was filled with cheering cadets and fans just like it was when I was there in the 1960’s.

College games in particular can be thrilling, with come-from-behind victories and the occasional big surprise when one of the powerhouse teams is knocked off by an unranked rival, and a great game between two evenly matched teams, like yesterday’s game between 3rd ranked Iowa and 4th ranked Penn State is hard to match for excitement and pageantry and the thrill of a really hard-fought contest.

I guess the first half of the Penn State—Iowa game was nearly over when I realized that every single person in that stadium in Iowa City was unmasked.  None of the players and coaches were wearing masks, naturally, and every time the network cameras focused on the crowd, all you could see were the unmasked fresh faces of the fans – most of them from Iowa, of course, since the game was played at Kinnick Stadium, but I didn’t see any masks on Penn State fans, either.  Not on those who were clearly students or on the adult fans who had made the trip half way across the country to see the game.

Later in the evening I watched the Alabama—Texas A&M game, and it was the same thing.  A gigantic stadium filled to its uppermost seats with unmasked fans of both teams.  It was a squeaker of a game.  Unranked Texas A&M beat Alabama, ranked 1st in the nation, 41 to 38.  When the game was over, the field filled with Aggies fans as they mobbed their team.  The same thing happened when Iowa beat Penn State – the field turned into a sea of the yellow t-shirts worn by Iowa students, and although the network cut away to the next game on their schedule, it was obvious that the celebration would go on in the stadium and later in Iowa City for the rest of the afternoon and night.

It’s happening all over again in the stadiums of professional football teams as they battle each other for dominance of the various divisions of the AFC and NFC conferences.  Before I sat down to write this, I watched the first half of the Bengals—Green Bay game in yet another stadium filled with unmasked fans.  In fact, the only references I heard to “masks” during any of the games were to occasional face-mask penalties meted out to players guilty of grabbing an opponent by the cage protecting his face, obviously a necessary element in such a violent sport.

Nobody during any of the coverage on any of the networks talked about the need for masks protecting people’s faces from the deadly virus stalking the states and cities where the games were played.  Apparently, those kinds of masks are “so 2020” in this second year of a pandemic which has killed over 700,000 Americans, certainly among them many football fans. 

And I find myself not caring a whit -- not about the fans, not about the players, not about the coaches or the game officials or anyone else associated with this sport I have enjoyed watching for so many years.  They have returned to packing themselves into those massive stadiums cheek to jowl, cheering on their teams at the tops of their lungs, doubtlessly spraying each other with all the aerosol droplets we have become so familiar with over the last 20 months, and I do not care how many of them will end up getting sick with the virus.  I don’t even care how many of them will die, and some certainly will.

I don’t know what it should be called – empathy erosion, or COVID exhaustion, or fatigue born of fatalism – but it’s not good.  Hell, Tracy and I have both experienced breakthrough cases of COVID, and you would think I’d be at least somewhat sensitive to the possibility of others coming down with this terrible virus, but I’ve been sitting here watching those stadiums filled with people who are out there on a Fall weekend having fun cheering on their teams, and I’m just not capable anymore of caring about them.  They have all had a choice.  They could go out there to a college campus or a big-city stadium and put on a mask and sit with other fans and make an attempt to take care that they’re not exposed to the virus or expose anyone else.  But they don’t.

I get it that the peer pressure of fandom is overwhelming, that they don’t want to be the one among the many with a piece of cotton or layers of paper on their faces.  They don’t want to be sitting there lifting the bottom of their masks to take a sip of a Coke, or to gobble down a few peanuts.  I get it.  But I don’t care about the peer pressure, I don’t care about the mob mentality that naturally prevails at an event like a football game.

This is not good.  I should care because if any of those tens of thousands of people I’ve caught glimpses of yesterday and last night and today contracts COVID, they become one more chance for the virus to get inside a human being and encountering some level of a body’s defenses either due to vaccination or a previous infection, find a way to mutate and embed itself in one person, and then be transferred to another person, and from that person to yet another person, until before you know it we are facing an Omega variant or a Epsilon variant or whatever they’re going to call it.

And then the newspaper will run yet another graph with yet another rising curve, and before you know it another couple hundred thousand of us will die, and we’ll hit yet another grim milestone, a million this time, and even more experts will be on our television screens shaking their heads from side to side, bewildered that a full two years after the pandemic began, or two and a half years, or three years later we are still counting the dead.

And as shown on a TV screen near you, still failing to wear masks to protect ourselves, even still refusing to be vaccinated, still listening to the largely Republican voices that continue to tell us not to worry, you can go to the grocery store without a mask, you can go to work without a mask, you can go virtually anywhere without being vaccinated, because that’s what their voters want to hear.

I know more people will get sick with the virus.  I know more people will die, but God help me, I have stopped caring.