There we were last week doing our best to mind our business during a pandemic, which anyone by now knows is becoming much harder than reviving Kodak. We were reading the news at durangoherald.com when we came upon “
By the time you read this, you may know this is about the 23-year-old Durango woman, Sadie Wendt, who was charged with disorderly conduct after an incident at the star-crossed O’Reilly Auto Parts store on north Main Avenue.
You may have heard about it because the incident seems to show that the breakdown in civility (that is one way to look at it) that has accompanied the pandemic has reached our burg (we are not immune); and because there is a moment in this small drama that may have made you, like us, stop reading to say, “What the ...”
Safety has been on everyone’s minds lately – safety from the pandemic, which seems to elude us; and also more general safety, as in freedom from fear, pain, offense and even from what we individually or collectively dislike about our fellow citizens. Of the last, almost everyone seems to have a list these days.
Safety clearly was on Wendt’s mind, or at least she thought it was when she went to the O’Reilly store, wearing her mask as people should to try to limit transmission of the disease, and discovered she was frequenting a retail establishment where others disagreed. So she did what so many Americans are going in for these days and told the maskless people what they should be doing.
First, though, in their presence, she asked the store manager why they were not wearing masks. Here are some possible answers:
Because it is really hard in this country and even in this notionally enlightened city to get everyone on the same page, let alone when there is a local mandate telling them all to wear the same thing, even if it is for everyone’s protection. This is not new. Getting through this pandemic in anything like one piece, if we do, will take forbearance as well as diligence.
Because, as it happens, the manager does not require masks in the store, as he does not believe the mandate is an enforceable law and he can’t make customers wear them. He is wrong; the store could do what many other stores have done and require masks. That is, we could try to pull together more – but this is the world as we find it. And the only thing that will change it is reason. An appeal to enlightened self-interest. Not shame. And definitely not punching people in the face.
That was not good enough for Wendt. Next, by her account, some of the maskless customers called her a libtard, and said this is a free country, which is an increasingly debatable proposition. Free from fear? No. Free from sickness? Violence? Cussedness? One customer told her, she said, to choke herself with her mask. So she did the reasonable thing and took her business ... Nope:
“I went up and hit him in the face because I felt threatened,” she said.
Has anyone ever made a statement more lacking in reason and compassion? This is why a snake bites. Wendt is not a snake.
People who go to stores and don’t wear masks probably do threaten the welfare of others, abstractly. The customer whom she punched in the face restrained Wendt in self-defense. Wendt thought she was acting in self-defense, too – abstractly.
But punching people in the face is anything but safe or abstract, and is too reptilian for human society.
