Will The Mask Mandate For Plane Travel Ever End?

Authored by Scott Morefield, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Like those horses on Yellowstone that just refuse to be ridden, I’d like to think that I never, ever ‘broke’ to the habit of mask-wearing.

It’s always awful. It’s always uncomfortable. Every moment I’m forced to wear one of those contraptions is a moment of completely unnecessary suffering enforced by power-hungry, hypochondriac tyrants whose primary goal is to make people miserable for as long as possible.

Sure, adults and even children get ‘accustomed to’ masks over time, but those who make that argument should remember that prisoners also eventually get institutionalized. I never got used to mask wearing, and I WEAR THAT fact like a badge of honor.

Unlike many, I was fortunate enough to be in a state where I could largely ignore the toothless ‘mask mandate’ in my county. Businesses rarely if ever raised a peep at the few maskless people who entered their doors even during the height of the pandemic. They wanted people to wear masks, but they wanted the business more so they didn’t turn customers away. But airports, airplanes, trains, and train stations are an entirely different matter. There, peasants like you and I are forced – at proverbial gunpoint – to wear masks for hours on end with little to no reprieve.

I’ve had the misfortune of having to fly several times during this ridiculous era, and each time is a misery all its own. But having to play the Kabuki theater there when almost the entire rest of the country, including New York City, is living normally, is somehow worse.

Last week, as Covid restrictions faded away in even the bluest of places, for the ‘crime’ of simply needing to fly to Texas I found myself again forcibly gagged while traversing a bleak, mindless hellscape where time has inexplicably stood still.

Compared to the ‘free’ world, airports and airplanes are like dystopian, alternate realities with a forced order that has absolutely zero basis IN reality. In it, we masked zombies wander seemingly aimlessly from place to place, barely looking up, clearly agitated and unhappy yet powerless to remedy the situation lest we find ourselves on a no-fly list or, worse, in a prison cell. Forcibly muzzling passengers who have already been treated like cattle for decades is the perfect leftist power-play, and they’re playing it for maximum impact.

As the pre-flight recording makes abundantly and obnoxiously clear down to the excruciating detail of what needs to happen after every bite and sip, travelers are expected to be fully masked from above the nose to below the mouth during every non-eating and drinking second of our existence at these infernal places. It’s torture enough on relatively short, on-time flights, but God help you if your flight is delayed, and even God won’t be able to help you if you’re stuck for hours on a tarmac inside a plane that has ‘mechanical issues.’ Breathing freely is, after all, secondary to ‘following the rules.’ 

Traveling is stressful enough without this, and yet this is what our tyrannical overlords impose in the name of ‘safety.’

They don’t care about your ‘comfort,’ only your obedience.

They know damn well cloth masks aren’t worth the t-shirt material it took to manufacture them and that the recycled air on planes makes them as safe or safer than anywhere else indoors, and yet the federal travel mask mandate is likely to be extended even beyond the supposed March 18 expiration. 

Why? I submit it’s because they can. It’s a scientific fact that if these crazed, hypochondriac power mongers could control society like they can control those places with the iron fist of the TSA, we’d be in masks forever. They can’t, of course, which is why the politics changed enough for them to ‘relax’ mandates almost everywhere.

But airports and airplanes are a different animal. There, the ‘security theater’ practiced for decades fits perfectly with the newer but even more sinister ‘mask theater’ of the Covid era.

If passengers are still forced to remove their shoes because of the clumsy actions of some loser more than twenty years ago, do you think forcibly muzzling people for the next two decades and beyond is an issue for these ghouls?