Masked Desperadoes, Unmasked Contrarians

I spent most of yesterday feeling vaguely unwell.  Not anything I could put my finger on, but definitely out of sorts.  It eventually resolved itself yesterday evening with a spectacularly upset stomach, which left me exhausted.  Hence yesterday's rather brief post here.  I still didn't feel too great today, but I had a lot to get done.  Not least making my first masked foray to my local shops.  There is no doubt that wearing the bloody things is inconvenient and uncomfortable, but, if we must, we must.  It really isn't an issue to get upset about if you are a normal, rational, human being.  If, on the other hand, you are a contrarian crackpot, then it is a gross infringement of your civil rights and something to die in a ditch over.  Thankfully, none of them seemed to be in evidence in Crapchester's shops today because, really, I've had enough of contrarians.  There's a time to challenge the status quo and received wisdom and a time when we need to go along with the flow.  Most of the time, the majority of us can discern the difference.  But contrarians, they just can't.  They always have to be different.  Whatever it is, they're against it.  If it is popular, of course.  Which is why you see so many of them suddenly becoming apologists for Trump. for instance, because he's now on the backfoot.  Suddenly, the very liberal causes they were supporting last year become the enemy because they've now gained traction and popularity.  Really, in this respect contrarians are the ultimate reactionaries.

Luckily, though, I'm not a contrarian, so I wore a mask when I was in the shops today.  In the end I opted for a standard, cheap, disposable type for this first foray.  Although, I do have the option of sporting a bandana as a face covering.  It is just that I'm afraid that some retailers might mistake me for a Western desperado attempting to hold them up.  Which is ridiculous, of course - If I really was a Western desperado, I'd be wearing a stetson as well.  That and the fact that we don't have many instances of hold-ups by lone cowboys here in Crapchester.  We do, however, have a few contrarians of our own.  At the height of the lockdown we had a group of anti-lockdown protestors holding 'rallies' in my local park.  I seem to recall that the second and last of these quite literally consisted of just two people and a dog.  I encountered some of them after their first meeting, after they had been moved on to the town centre, as I came out of Tesco.  (Those were the days when it was utterly deserted - how I miss those days).  As far as I could make out, their 'argument' was that the lockdown was an infringement on their rights to do stuff.  To which the obvious counter-argument is that, surely, the majority of us have the right to not to have our right to life and health threatened by behaviour that might spread a highly virulent and potentially fatal virus.  Doe protecting the trghts of the majority outweigh the 'rights' of the few?  None of which they wanted to debate, instead falling back on the defence that the threat of Covid-19 had been exaggerated by false reporting of the fatality rate in order for the government to - well, you can fill the rest in for yourselves.  Standard conspiracy theory stuff.  So there you are - I was going to write about how I was still feeling too ill to come up with a proper post for today.  But somehow, I have.