The new protocols of trust

We are forced to live with the new protocols of trust. After the World Trade Center attacks via aircraft in 2001, security changed around the world. All it took was for one major destination – with several hubs – the United States, to insist on new security measures. That changed how people traveled around the world. After that, metal detectors, x-ray machines, personal inspection multiplied exponentially worldwide. Taking off your shoes and not wearing anything metal has become the new norm in airports. And everyone accepted it. We had no choice. Their borders, their rules. Do we even remember air travel before that?

The threat of being bombed then spread to shopping malls and government buildings, again, mostly in the US. Even countries and cities with little or no possibility of becoming terrorist targets bought into it. Once again, everyone just unthinkingly accepted it. Think about that now.

Then came COVID-19, and again, everyone reacted first with fear, then compliance.  Initially, there was some resistance to wearing masks in public. Inexorably, establishments simply applied a “no mask, no entry” policy. Nobody questioned their right to impose it. And now everyone gets to have their heart rate slightly elevated when that digital thermometer gun is pointed at your forehead. I’ve tried playfully recoiling as if I’ve been shot in the head. Some security guards found it funny. I still don’t. Like sheep, we just go along, because it’s easier. Soon, we’ll be jumping through hoops to enter the mall or grocery. At least it’s starting to feel like that.

We’ve accepted that commercial establishments (and sports arenas) make us all feel like suspects when we enter their doors. Now, they make us feel like carriers (or lepers), instead. That’s the new level of trust in modern society. I don’t much care for it. Other countries like Sweden and Taiwan didn’t need a lockdown and performed even better, so that proves that there are other ways to get safety down.

This new trust protocol now informs everything we do and will do in the foreseeable future. On one hand, it can be understandable, since nobody truly comprehends coronaviruses in the media, if we’re bone-bare honest about it.

This will dictate the segregation of sports according to which will be easy to do, which will need the least adjustment. How many people will come into the venue? (See, we’re already assuming that there are no spectators.) Now would be a good time to review John Travolta’s 1976 film, “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.” It feels like it, walking around suffocated and sweating with masks, face shields. Sports with less players, no contact and played in smaller spaces will get preferential treatment. I’m surprised e-games tournaments aren’t being played and broadcast online yet. But nobody wants to be the first to test the new norm yet. Let’s just all jump on the bandwagon later.

Government is in the same boat, and we can’t blame them. Better overkill than outbreak. They have families, too. And they have almost the same sources of information that we do. Who are they really getting information from anyway, the tainted WHO? That’s why there was such outrage from fitness center, health club and gym owners when spas, salons and barber shops were announced to be “essential for health and well-being” and they were not. Let’s make it simple. On one hand, you have establishments where clients are constantly being touched physically, the staff are in your personal space, and you could get cut from a haircut, shave, manicure, pedicure or even a fingernail. On the other, you have gyms where there is practically no touching, most of the clientele wear gloves to protect their hands, there is naturally more distance between people, and equipment can easily be disinfected without being boiled, where safety is automatically enforced. Strange, but like I said, even government is new to this.

When sports resume, a lot of the joy will have been sucked out if it. It will feel like going back to a nuclear testing site where we once lived. Even if masked crowds are somehow allowed, we can’t see each other’s faces. Our cheers will be muffled. We can’t even have popcorn or the fast food we complained about but ate, anyway. We will also have the underlying tension that we are taking a major health risk, even if we don’t know whether that is true or not. It’s like the NBA when they allowed HIV-positive Magic Johnson to play again, then he gets cut during a game.

Seriously, conspiracy theories aside, a vaccine is not the solution, because all of this will happen again. Did they stop making bombs after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? On the contrary, they made them smaller, better, cheaper, more deadly; everybody wanted one, assuming that was the deterrent. There are labs all over the world thinking “next,” surely as many as or more than the ones concocting a vaccine.

Something big has been taken away from sports, something integral, elevating, revealing, enhancing. It’s the people. Because now, we’ve decided that everyone is a suspect, everyone is Typhoid Mary, everyone is a danger to everyone else. I can’t tell you how sad that makes me. Someone has to change something somewhere, somehow. But who has any other answers?