Mask Discipline Variance Considered Harmful

Note: Title inspired by famous computer science paper by Edsger Dĳkstra: “goto Considered Harmful.”

Recently, Mike sent along news about a woman in Galveston, Texas who refused to wear a mask when she entered a local Bank of America. The body-cam footage from the officers suggests that both the management of the bank and the police explained to her how Governor Abbot’s abnegation of state-directed mask-wearing policy still allows businesses to enforce whatever behavior they expect on their premises. She woman flips out. She calls the other customers “sheep.” She seems to expect a revolution to protect her right to flout the standards of behavior expected by a private business under legal directive.

While, philosophically, I grant that a Governor-directed mandate should trigger alarm bells of executive overreach (and did in 2020), I think this interaction demonstrates why Gov. Abbot should not have rescinded the order yet. Lacking a uniform source of appeal (e.g. statute, executive order), variance in custom requires per-interaction negotiation. This negotiation puts undue additional pressure on local peace officers and business owners and serves as coercive pressure on proprietors.

HOT UPDATE: Per Mike, apparently this woman pulled the same stunt at another business.

When one goes into a restaurant, one knows what to expect:

Menus are brought shortly after seating
Appetizers are not free
Payment comes at the end

While not legally mandated, society and the process of being parented instill society’s expectations.

There are also standards of behavior-conformance:

You may not wear your gold lamé G-string
You must wear a shirt
etc.

No one finds these onerous and, to the extent they do, they’re willing to go along so as to get some of those flavor-packed jalapeño poppers, or a Bloomin' Onion™.

But with Texas’ abnegation of directive, now every interaction must be negotiated anew. Compare this with the restaurant case: you walk in someone expects you to put a deposit in before getting a menu and payment is only permitted in bitcoin. This suffices as a surprise and while private enterprise is certainly entitled to do such, it requires negotiation anew.

This non-uniform specification of behavior occasions peer pressure and coercion in order to regress the proprietor’s behavior to the community’s mean. Instead of enshrining “choice for Texans” or “choice for Texas business,” what’s enshrined is a system of bullying of proprietors.

To return to our test case, in the case of the Galveston woman, she was bringing the expectations of (say) her nearby convenience store to a Bank of America. While the mega-bank is perfectly fine drawing the line, summoning the police, etc. to protect the health of their employees and the expectation of safety in their branch, I wonder about the smaller businesses.

Imagine that I ran a small family-run fried chicken joint (like the fondly-remembered Hickory Hollow) with my elderly granny tending the salad bar, what am I to do? I would like my customers to observe mask discipline for Granny’s sake. Some customers don’t know or care about Granny ladling out the buttermilk ranch with a mask on. In this hypothetical, I have to put up signage, turn away my customers, stop in the middle of the lunch rush to engage with the recalcitrant, etc. This engenders bad business goodwill (“Tucker told me masks are diapers, I’m never comin’ back here!”), business slowdown (“Excuse me, I have to tell RushHeroFreedom1776 to obey my choice to enforce mask discipline”), and provides a platform for violence and anger. And it’s all perfectly avoidable with an iota of leadership from the governor.

Humans are social and avaricious creatures. By this act, the governor has put small businesses in a bind and offloaded the onus of being a real leader on the business owners. As such, the public can drive the mid-size business owner’s behavior (“None of the other stores around here make us!”) which, allegedly, this act was designed to empower.