WHAT WE OWE OTHERS

I usually tell stories about situations in which I’ve been directly involved. Occasionally, if it’s really good, I re-tell a story that someone told me about something that happened to them. Today, I’ll begin with a personal story to provide context for a related, very funny story that someone told me about an experience he had.

I played high school basketball and baseball. I had friends on the wrestling team and admired their commitment to that sport. Though wrestling isn’t very dynamic and doesn’t require much dexterity, trying to rough someone up or being roughed up is gritty and primal. In the right measure, gritty and primal are pleasing. DIY wrestling also provides compelling metaphors for life.

During the past thirty years, most boys haven’t wrestled in gym class. I guess it’s considered barbaric. But back in the day, we had a two-week wrestling unit in gym class each year. I was good at it, in a gym class sort of way. I lifted weights, had good cardio and agility and, from having played some football and having brothers, knew how to apply leverage and knock someone down. I won all my gym class matches.

Except as follows.

One day, instead of conducting simultaneous, decentralized one-on-one matches, we had a tag team match in front of the whole gym class. Half of the 45 boys lined up, from lightest to heaviest, on each side of the nearly windowless, high, white cinderblock-walled, giant navy blue-matted wrestling room. The lightest kid from each side went to the mat’s center circle. The teacher blew his whistle and the pair wrestled for about forty-five seconds, until one pinned his opponent or clearly had the upper hand. Then, the teacher blew the whistle again. The next heaviest boy from the loser’s side ran into the mat’s center and immediately wrestled the winner, who, as King of the Mat, stayed in the circle for as long as he continued to win.

The non-combatants cheered and pounded the mat in support of whoever was winning. Kids can be bandwagon-jumping front-runners. As the past four years have shown, adults also follow the mob.

In the tag team match, my turn came against a kid named Tom, a linebacker on the football team. Tom was strong and scrappy. I jumped him shortly after he had won his prior bout and briefly gained the upper hand. He broke free and put me in some wicked hold. He was giving me a taste of my own medicine. I didn’t like it. I struggled to escape as he tried to flip and pin me. The other kids shouted and pounded the mat. When you’re trying to stave off being pinned, with people shouting for you to lose—or to escape, I couldn’t tell—it’s a stark, vivid crisis, unlike normal, daily life.

I couldn’t escape, though I stayed off my back and was saved by the whistle.

I should use Tom’s surname to give him props for having beaten me. But at my 40th high school reunion, someone said that, like multiple other classmates, Tom had died more than a decade earlier of a drug overdose. Rest in peace, Tom. You were a vital young man.

—

As an adult, I had a Japanese American friend named Craig who was in a low weight class on his high school wrestling team. Craig didn’t fit the aggressive, sinewy, working-class mold of my high school’s wrestlers. He was cerebral, had delicate hands—with which he deftly played guitar leads—was kind of a slacker and his father was a DuPont executive. Craig joined the team because he was too small for other sports and because his older brother had been a state champion wrestler; in Delaware, with its tiny population. But still…

One week, Craig’s same-weight teammates were either hurt, sick or over the weight limit. Hence, Craig had to wrestle for the varsity. In wrestling matches, each team compiles the points awarded in each of the dozen individual bouts. A team gets the maximum score per bout if its wrestler pins his opponent. Thus, even if an individual grappler loses, he helps his team by avoiding being pinned. If a high school wrestler finds himself in the un-fun situation I was in against Tom, he has to try as hard as he can to fight off some strong guy applying all of his leverage to pin him. And the periods are longer.

Craig’s varsity debut began badly. His opponent quickly took him down and was going in for the figurative kill. As this happened, Craig said his teammates ran over to where he was on his back, pounded the mat, waved towels and shouted for him to fight with everything he had to keep from being pinned. Craig was in a bad spot. He summoned all of his strength and flexibility to keep at least one shoulder off the mat.

Given my bout with Tom, I could empathize with Craig as he told his story. It’s one thing to talk about this situation. It’s a rawer, more desperate thing to experience.

While the room spun around him and his testosterone-fueled teammates frenetically carried on, Craig had a revelation. He told himself:

“I don’t owe these guys shit!”

He gave up and was pinned instantly. The referee slammed the mat, ending his match and his ordeal. His teammates threw down their towels and stomped away, disgustedly.

Envisioning, and to some extent reliving, similar, bygone wrestling experiences, Craig and I laughed very hard, undoubtedly spewing droplets.

—

Many religious texts, ethics discussions, classic novels, stage dramas and movies have examined what one person owes his/her fellow humans. Friendships, courtships and business relationships are built on understandings of what one owes others. These relationships end when people disagree about what is owed or when one fails, in the eyes of the beholder, to fulfill those obligations.

I seldom bring this up but it’s relevant here: I’ve done thousands of hours of various types of volunteer work, formal and informal. I’ve done this stuff because I felt that I owed other humans some of my time to try to make their lives a little better. This sense of obligation derives from an awareness that God has blessed, and others have helped, me in various ways. I’m trying to repay those cosmic debts. Though I could always have done more, I haven’t been all about myself.

And in general, I try to treat the people I encounter with respect.

During Coronamania, many unprecedently and unreasonably demanded that healthy people hide in their homes, forgo experiences that made them happy, cover their faces, take tests even though they felt fine and inject experimental substances falsely labeled as “vaccines.” Some parents cloistered or masked their kids because they said that doing so would teach kids that they should sacrifice to help others.

But these measures didn’t help others. Places that didn’t impose these measures had very similar outcomes to those that did. The NPIs and shots were scientifically unsound. They were superstition packaged as sophistication. They were performative. They were all pain and no gain.

The compliant called those who rejected those measures selfish, ignorant, grandma killers and other epithets. Some of the compliant became so indignant about non-compliance with social distancing “protocols” or masking or vaxxing mandates that they insisted that the scofflaws should be forbidden to enter public places, should lose their jobs and should even be barred from grocery stores. Many even supported imprisoning the unjabbed. It’s unforgettable.

Instead of stridently supporting such compulsory compliance, the Covophobic could simply have supplied self-help. If the measures that the Coronamaniacs considered protective had been scientifically sound, the NPI and shot backers could have protected themselves by adopting such measures. They didn’t need others to go along. In this important way, such demands for compliance were unlike proscribing such actively offensive conduct as physically threatening or assaulting others or polluting the air or water, against which victims can’t protect themselves.

Additionally, it was never clear to me when or how those who demanded that all comply with the NPIs and shots had earned, via their prior conduct, special status that entitled them to impute “spread-stopping” obligations to others and to boss others around. The Coronamanic individuals whom I knew seemed, pre-2020, not to have sacrificed much on behalf of others. As far as I could tell, they hadn’t taken any vow of poverty. Nor did they do such things as visit strangers in nursing homes or adopt special needs kids. Voting for “progressives,” donating to NARAL, listening to NPR or driving Priuses doesn’t confer or connote moral or intellectual superiority or reflect active commitment to serving others.

Because the virus never scared me and the measures to address it never made sense, I never felt obligated to abandon logic and validate others’ irrational fear by complying with the NPIs or shot mandates. Instead, I resented and rejected the Coronamaniacs’ efforts to make me and others play along with their mitigation theater and to deprive us skeptics of activities that we enjoyed and that hurt no one.

In the 1980s, people used to say, sarcastically, “Excuse me for breathing!” Who could have foreseen that, from 2020-22, tens of millions of neurotic, ignorant individuals would expect others to feel respiratory remorse?

I never felt guilty for living as normally as I could over the past four years. As Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty poem says, people came to this country “yearning to breathe free(ly).” Even during peak Coronamania, I never saw a reason to abandon that basic aspiration.

Since March 16, 2020, I’ve felt the same about the Corona-crazed as Craig did about his lathered-up wrestling teammates: I didn’t owe them shit.

Instead, the Coronamanic owe me and millions of other Covid dissidents an unqualified apology for the vast, unnecessary, permanent harm their beloved, but silly, NPIs and jabs predictably caused.

As I wait, I won’t hold my breath.