PRINCETON, CORONAMANIA AND DOING WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO DO

On a mid-April 2025 Saturday afternoon, I went to see a Princeton University baseball game. My brother’s son pitched for Princeton’s visitor, Brown. The weather was beautiful: clear, dry, sunny and in the low-70s.

I wore my black “I SURVIVED CORONAMANIA: UNMASKED, UNINJECTED, UNFRAID” t-shirt. Some Princeton fans in the 250-person crowd crinkled their noses at the shirt, though none made eye contact or said anything to me, even as I cheered conspicuously in their midst as my nephew struck out a bunch of Princeton guys.

He also did well this summer in Cape Cod’s College Baseball League. He throws hard and accurately, changes speeds and makes the ball move unpredictably. There’s talk that a Major League team will draft him next year.

In today’s hyper-specialized world, my nephew hasn’t batted in a game since his freshman year in high school. I liked to swing the bat. There’s nothing like it. The thrown ball comes in fast. There’s a fine line and a split-second between success and failure. If you succeed, you feel a pleasingly heavy sensation in your hands, hear a loud crack, and see a small, white sphere rapidly rise and move away from you. Human motion and verbal commotion follow immediately thereafter. A baseball hit delivers a serious dopamine hit. I wish pitchers would get a chance to swing the bat every once in a while. But I wish in vain for many things far more important than that.

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On that April day, my wife, Ellen, and I sat, five rows behind the first-base dugout, alongside my brother and two of his erstwhile fraternity brothers from Virginia Commonwealth University. Over the decades, I had hung out several times with these amiable guys.

After the game, my brother’s wife, who was sitting with one of her New Jersey-based college friends, joined us after having spectated from lawn chairs along the right-field line. Being too close to the action can make a pitcher’s mother nervous.

My sister-in-law agrees with me about Coronamania. But when her friend saw my shirt, her friend read it aloud and asked what it meant. I answered, “It means the past five years were a complete overreaction.”

She immediately became agitated and said, “I disagree with you about everything. I was taking care of my 95-year-old mother.”

She didn’t claim that her mother died of, or even got, The Virus.

Not seeing her point, I asked, calmly, “Does that mean kids should have been kept out of school for 18 months?”

Before she could answer, my SIL de-escalated the exchange by stepping into the ten feet between us, waving her arms and saying, “OK, that’s enough! This is over!”

Though I’m willing to discuss the Scamdemic, at length, with anyone, I didn’t want to make this spontaneous debate the most memorable part of an otherwise enjoyable afternoon. So I didn’t press the issue. By suggesting the absence of a connection between the health of her 95-year-old mother and schoolkids living normal lives, I had already made my point to anyone within earshot who might have had an open mind.

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The oft-heard, latter-day Scamdemic notions that “we know better now” and that “we won’t repeat this mistake” are deeply unsatisfying. These phrases confer no consolation. Vast, permanent, easily avoidable damage has been done.

Worse, many still think, as my SIL’s friend seemed to, that the theatrical overreaction and shots saved humanity. They display a distinct lack of knowledge and logic about what happened. And they’ve never considered the Scamdemic’s impact on the larger society, not only while the lockdowns, etc. were happening but also in the future.

They have tunnel vision because their TV and internet news sources repeated too many slogans and displayed too many death tickers and graphs presenting fake data. They repeatedly saw and believed videos of morgue trucks, people hooked to ventilators and Chinese guys collapsing in the street. They had also been well-propagandized in advance. They had seen sci-fi movies about contagions and knew the words “Ebola” and “Spanish Flu,” though they couldn’t tell you much about either of these. Besides, in Spring 2020, their work colleague’s wife’s grandmother’s 94-year-old’s friend with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home was killed by The Virus. Or so they had heard.

As during the truncated post-game exchange above, the Coronamanic never had to defend their support for the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots by answering a few basic questions that would have exposed the illogic of it all.

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This misinformed group includes many Princeton grads and graduates of many other colleges, including the private college where my SIL met her friend. During 2020-21, Princeton displayed Styrofoam placards on the main quad with the names of a few dozen—out of over 100,000 living—alumni who purportedly died of Covid. As Ivy colleges like to add the class year after alums’ names—it’s another old-school-tie signifier—I couldn’t help but notice that the ostensible viral victims had graduated many decades earlier; more “with, not from” deaths. But the privileged progressives who run that institution couldn’t pass up an opportunity to simultaneously claim victimhood and exhibit demagoguery. As throughout the Scamdemic, the subtext was, “Last month it was them. Next month, it might be you.”

Uh, maybe…if you were over 80, diabetic and on statins. But even then, highly unlikely.

When I saw these placards, I suspected that Princeton had never similarly memorialized the far more numerous alums who had died of either pneumonia, dementia or alcoholism or had committed suicide. Somehow, those deaths didn’t have the same cachet.

Princeton also barred unvaxxed, unmasked people like me from attending a hockey game from 2021-2023 and has welcomed speakers like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, both of whom put the Scam in Scamdemic, aggressively sought to marginalize anti-lockdown truth-tellers and inaccurately assured the public that the vaxxes “would stop infection and spread.” I suspect it has paid these individuals big honoraria for their blather. But the internet and the University are conspicuously coy about such indelicate details.

—

One of my brother’s two game-attending friends creates colorful paintings for a living. I very much like the ones I’ve seen. When he saw my shirt, he politely asked me why I hadn’t taken the shots. I said that the virus never frightened me, the shots had no long-term safety record and I didn’t want to contribute to the phony narrative that some injection had saved the human race from the worst Plague since the 1300s.

When I asked if he’d taken the shot, I thought that, as an artist, he might have had an independent streak and declined it. Instead, he said he had injected. He shrugged and explained, casually, “I just thought it was something we were supposed to do.”

I found his explanation interesting. I wondered what the term “supposed to do” meant and about the nonchalant way he said it.

The dictionary defines “suppose” as “presuming something is true without certain knowledge.” The phrase, “what we were supposed to do,” adds a second layer of passivity. It connotes that one isn’t just making his own presumption, he’s fulfilling others’ expectations by implicitly adopting the presumptions that underlie those expectations.

When I heard the artist’s jab justification, it felt as if he was lumping the inoculations in with such innocuous behaviors as showing up on-time, saying “Thank you” when someone does you a favor, spending holidays with your in-laws or bussing your table at Chipotle. People do these things because that’s what’s expected of them.

Most who fulfill others’ expectations may not think much about why they do so. Those who do think about what they’re supposed to do might take a broader, practical view of their conduct. Upon reflection, they may have concluded that consensus and conformity make for a more harmonious, better society. Though, depending on what conduct is expected, going along to get along can facilitate profound damage. See, e.g., the past five-and-a-half years.

Doing what one is “supposed to do” connotes undue deference or obedience. It’s like being back in grade school, standing in a line and doing what your linemates do. It’s behaviorally tautological: I do it because I’m supposed to do it. It was like drinking Kool-Aid.

Injecting because that’s what one was “supposed to do” also implies that those who jabbed served the public. From the Scamdemic’s beginning, governments cynically exploited naive, misplaced altruism.

Taking shots because one thinks that one is supposed to do so also reflects the dubious bias that medical interventions are generally worthwhile, rather than a profit opportunity for the physician or the corporation that employs them or makes a given drug or device. It turned out that medical systems gave bonuses to doctors who convinced enough people to inject.

—

I briefly wondered if my brother’s friend’s focus on “supposed to” was a Southern US cultural thang. My two daughters graduated from the University of Alabama. They enjoyed their overall experience there and are doing important, interesting public facing work.

Though my daughters didn’t apply to Princeton, their SATs were higher than most who got in there. Princeton boasts that the top 75% of its admittees scored very high— above 740—on critical thinking. But when it mattered, in 2020-22, those who attended, taught at or ran that place showed clear, painfully consequential critical thinking deficits. Many community college students and plumbers outthought them.

I liked the people I met on the trips we made down South. They’re more courteous, warmer and friendlier than are most New Jerseyans. I enjoyed, for example, when Alabamians or Mississippians called me “Mr. Mark.”

Some have opined that Southern politeness is insincere. I don’t have enough of a sample to evaluate that or to generalize. Nor do I assume the worst about strangers, especially friendly ones. Regardless of its basis, I prefer politeness to rudeness. Most social interaction is fleeting. I don’t need to know what everyone’s motivations are.

Every once in a while, I’ve suggested to my daughters that I’d like to live down South. It’s not because I hate the NJ winters; I like snow and ice. I just like the people down there.

Both daughters have told me that I wouldn’t fit in below the Mason-Dixon Line. Aside from tawking funny, they said that my willingness to state my views without regard to whether others would like me wouldn’t go over well in Southern culture; any remotely confrontational message is frowned upon. Some have theorized that this social approach is an adaptation to the climate. When the weather gets hot, tempers can flare. Knowing this, people tread lightly.

Be that as it may, expressing my counter-narrative views on Coronamania hasn’t been well-received in the North, either. There was, and has long been, some less subtle or genteel form of “supposed to” in my region. Over the past five years, I’ve seen, more clearly and consequentially than ever, Northerners’ proclivity for groupthink. When Coronamania became fashionable, people became irate when others didn’t stay home and mask. Later, the Vaxx Mob wanted to take away jobs, schooling, social life, medical insurance, food and children from those who didn’t inject.

All this coercion was even more outrageous because the death rate was so low and age-stratified and because those who believed in the shots and masks should have felt virally bulletproof. Despite all of the illogic and misinformation that shaped their worldview, in the non-Southern US, the prevailing ethic wasn’t “supposed to do.” It was “you must do.”

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I suspect that, without being aware of it, I often do what I’m supposed to do. My sense of propriety largely aligns with others’ codes. And I don’t go around looking for arguments.

Despite my oft-stated disgust about the Scamdemic, I don’t have an opinion about everything. I don’t consume enough news to always know what I’m supposed to get riled up about or who I’m supposed to side with. Maybe a good rule of thumb would be to oppose the side that the media favors.

The Covid charade was different from all prior media blitzes. It hit too close to home to disregard. And it was so absurd and evil that I didn’t care about alienating people who fell for it. I decided that any friends I lost over this were replaceable. I had to replace them because I couldn’t trust their judgment anymore.

Governments lack the moral or constitutional authority to make people stay home, cover their faces or put unwanted substances in their bodies. Humans deserve at least that level of self-sovereignty. When told to go along with authoritarian foolishness by staying home, masking or injecting an experimental substance, “supposed to” should have been thrown out the window.

If the government can require you to be stuck in the arm with mRNA-loaded needles on the premise that injections might arguably extend some very old person’s life, what would stop them from mandating blood, kidney or other organ or tissue “donations?” Tyrants have often justified oppression by claiming that they’re helping The People.

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Instead of doing what others thought I should do, I weighed the lockdowns, masks and shots’ risks against their purported rewards. Based on facts, logic and biology and health self-care study I had done, my decisions not to confine myself, mask or inject were among the easiest I’ve ever made.

Many locked down, masked, tested and took the shots because they were afraid of a virus. Others yielded to these mandates because they took (too) seriously threats that, if they didn’t, they’d be fined, lose their jobs or be barred from public places. But many injected and participated in the other aspects of the Corona charade because they thought they were supposed to. That orientation never made sense to me.

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Note: Every week, thousands of the same people read my posts. Only a tiny fraction of these readers “Like” these. If you’re a regular reader, I’d appreciate it if you’d do what your conduct suggests and Like/heart this post. I want to see if doing so prompts Substack to make my posts more visible to others.

Thanks.