I still occasionally see people going about their business wearing WuFlu masks. I try not to overtly point and laugh, because I’m still pretending to be polite and civilized. Obviously, people should be free to wear or not wear whatever they like so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. A bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts has apparently been requiring masks for all their patrons since the pandemic but recently decided to ease up the restriction for one night per week, making the masks optional for one day per week. As you might imagine, this move hasn’t gone down well with their customers:
Image via Not the Bee
Crybullying is a way of controlling other people. Predators and psychopaths pose: They deliberately put on sad face or hurt face when they want suckers to lower their guard so they can get what they want.
If you’ve been online today, you’ve probably seen discussion of the mindblowing Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts that recently decided to start having weekly mask-optional nights, after many years of requiring KN-95 masks or better from patrons. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this, let me just say that no, you haven’t accidentally clicked on an article from 2021. This is happening now.
After the Last Ditch Bar posted their new mask rules on social media, they were immediately buried in rage-inflected comments from people who were in absolute agony over the way the place was just absolutely murdering them.
Sample comment: “You have shattered what I believed your values to be, and you should be ashamed to use the word radical to describe your venue in the same post where you’re announcing a decision to deliberately spread disabling diseases, that we know disproportionately impact marginalized populations, one night each week.”
Did you know that Covid-19 is medically much worse if you’re a politically radical lesbian? Second sample comment: “This is such a stab in the heart to those of us who have no choice but to protect our health. Esp when l0ng c0vid disproportionally affects queer folk.” That’s an interesting observation.
All of the bar’s efforts to calm the storm made it worse, and a community forum hosted by trained facilitators crashed and burned. I’m not going to describe that event or summarize it, because you should read every incredible detail yourself. Here’s the link again, in an archived form that gets you around the paywall and probably requires you to scroll down a bit to get through some blank space at the top. As a preview, though, one of the facilitators was white, which devastated the terrified attendees and made them feel that they were in extreme danger.
The mandatory mask-wearing somehow became a totem of belonging to the patrons of the bar and after so long, they are now reacting very strongly to any attempt to dilute their shared community with non-mask-wearing heathens.
I do know transplant recipients and neutropenic patients who wear masks in crowds because of increased risk of getting infections the rest of us don’t worry about.
I don’t laugh at people with masks because they may not be crazy, just vulnerable.
But they don’t ask the rest of to wear a mask to protect them.
Those people are crazy control freaks who should lose their rights to vote, own guns and maybe property.
Comment by Pat McCracken — September 24, 2026 @ 20:42