many years ago on HBO’s epic series “the wire” there was a soliloquy about the brown bag. in it, the police captain lauds the role of this humble item in keeping the peace in neighborhoods by providing a polite social fiction that neatly sidestepped an overbearing law that was not in keeping with the mores of baltimore society. it went like this:

a person’s stoop is their castle, and in the summer, it’s hot and they want to sit there. many who do so would like to enjoy a cold beer or other adult beverage.

doing so is illegal. you cannot drink on the street.

so the brown bag was the solution.

you put your beer in a brown bag and everyone wins.

you get to have your drink outside with your friends, the police get to walk by and ignore it because “who knows what’s in that bag and it’s not my place to ask,” and life goes on.

a little respect buys a lot of community peace.

it’s a social convention that gets everyone off each other’s backs around a law that no one really want to follow or enforce.

obviously, just getting rid of the law is a better outcome in every way, but sometimes life is the art of the possible and compromise is better than beating your head against something that’s just too entrenched.

i think we have an opportunity to do this same thing with covid. it starts here:

those vaccinated can stop wearing masks. OK.

those vaccinated have near zero risk from covid to the point where nothing anyone does around them can move the needle meaningfully because it’s already way too low to have any reduction matter materially. and masks never worked anyway.

so it’s a great climbdown for the agencies that have been pushing endlessly for inefficacious NPI’s and for vaccination.

if you want the vax, get the vax. do it, and you’re safe. what others do really does not affect you and “my mask never protected you” anyhow.

all we have to do is let everyone treat vax status like a brown bag.

if you walk around unmasked and un-distanced, we’ll assume you’re safe. maybe you had covid already and recovered. that confers as good or better immunity as a vaccination. maybe you’re young and healthy or a child and never had real risk.

it’s a perfect place to declare victory.

• the high risk are vaxxed and now near zero risk

• the recovered are near zero risk

• the low risk get to make a choice about vaccine risk/reward

• this choice really has no meaningful effect on anyone else: if they cared, they got vaxxed and have risk that’s less than 1/10th that of flu. society long since voted that that risk is below any level it cares about.

we get to climb down and restore social order, free choice, and restore lives and livelihoods by just engaging in a little polite social agreement not to ask and not to tell.

easy-peasy lemon squeezy.

if we can all just be a little calm and a little reasonable, we all get to climb down and move on.

can we all be a little reasonable?

sigh.

of course not. it’s been so long since anyone saw any “reasonable” health policy running around in the wild that many fear it’s gone extinct.

this issue gets framed like this:

and ideas like “it doesn’t matter because if you are vaccinated you’re so safe that the behavior of others is irrelevant, especially given how low the chance of asymptomatic spread is” all get chucked and we’re back to #zerocovid madness and moralizing absolutist rhetoric and demands for fascism.

the panic machine and it’s enablers and beneficiaries have lost no time lurching into motion. they do not want normal. they do not want freedom or individual choice. they want MOAR FEAR and MOAR POWER.

this is, of course, as predictable as sunrise. always was. they don’t want a climb down. they got a taste of dictatorial power and a firehouse of budgets. they found it to their liking.

and the classic enablers of fascism, the left wing rags and labor unions, are all over this too.

everyone wants “papers.” they are not even going to say “please.” at least the fascists in the 30’s were polite…

this stark ultimatum from the president (whose power to mandate this is, itself, utterly suspect) eggs the fasciati on. this is not a choice, it’s a threat. by this logic, “your money or your life” is your choice too. (huh, now that you mention it, that sounds a lot like tax policy, huh?)

they know they cannot mandate this governmentally (at least federally) and many states have already lined up against it so they are going to put the onus on private business to do it. it won’t be your president ramming a vaxpass down your throat, it will be your supermarket, your airline, and your uber driver.

they tried to do it with workplaces, but OSHA has, thus far, stood tall to protect us by mandating reporting of vaccine complications as workplace safety incidents if employers mandate vaccination.

this is important. vaccine passports are the inch we cannot yield. if you let them force you to present a document to go outside or eat out or ride the subway or go to work, you have surrendered all sovereignty. you now require affirmative consent to live your life and it can be revoked or withheld at whim.

you’ll need an annual booster or it will lapse. so you need to get this permission again, over and over. what will they do when they add new conditions? “oh, this year we need you bank accounts and investments rated by ESG.” “oh, now we need all your social media accounts.”

even if you trust this guy, do you trust every one that will follow to never abuse this? no way. we’re going to get columboed into a full blown chinese sesame system of governmentally driven but privately adjudicated social credit and privleges faster than you can say “wow, that was awful.” i walk through this logic in detail HERE.

if you let this start, it will not stop. if you give it purchase, it will never release its hold. and guys, it’s already starting. count on lori lightfoot and the axis of cuomoblasio to lead the charge.

people love to ask the question “is this the hill you want to die on?” well amigos, this one is. this is the one we need to hold if we want to keep owning our own lives.

it’s a simple, stark choice:

we can have brown bags or brown shirts.

we can be reasonable, accept rational risk/reward, and gain human agency and freedom, or

we can let these same jumped up authoritarians cement this outlandish joyride they have taken with our lives and livelihoods into law and make it eternal in the manner than only temporary government programs can be.

the choice is yours and you need to make it now and with implacable certitude.

make it well.

you’re going to have to live with it for the rest of your life.