Grace Doesn't Mean Agreement

 As always I've got lots to say about Charlie Kirk and the 25th anniversary of 9-11, but I'm tabling those thoughts for now and instead writing about masks and covid.   

I recently saw a video of a DSA conference (Democratic Socialists of America) and it was a mandatory mask event!  In 2026.  Crazy!

It got me thinking about my own experience with masks over the past six years - and I wrote those thoughts down...

Thanksgiving 2020 (crazy uncle Chris thinks masks are bullshit lol)

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Every so often, I look across a poker table and see someone wearing a mask. 

In 2026. 

I have to admit that my immediate reaction isn't particularly charitable.

I play poker regularly at my local Moose Lodge. We probably have around 150 active poker players, and on a typical tournament night we might have 50 people in the room. Out of all those people, there are two who still wear masks every single time they play. They put them on, sit down at the table, and keep them on throughout the tournament.

I'll call them Bonnie and Billy.

Bonnie once explained, without anybody really asking, that if she gets COVID, it could kill her. My immediate thought was: Then what are you doing here?

That's harsh. I know it is. And that's really what I've been wrestling with.

My Perspective Is Colored by Experience

My wife went through pancreatic cancer. She received ten rounds of FOLFIRINOX, an absolutely brutal chemotherapy regimen. After only a few infusions, her immune system was essentially nonexistent.

So we took it seriously. When we went to the infusion center, we wore masks. When we were at City of Hope, we wore masks. Otherwise, we were home. I worked from home. I stopped playing poker. I didn't go to the grocery store. We ordered from Amazon. We ordered food. We didn't go out socially. We essentially removed ourselves from public life because we understood something very simple: if Beverly was severely immunocompromised, being around lots of people was dangerous.

A mask wasn't some magical force field that made everything okay. We believed the safest thing was not being there in the first place.

That's why, when Bonnie tells me that COVID could literally kill her and then sits for hours in a crowded poker room, my brain has trouble reconciling those two things. If I genuinely believed walking into that room might kill me, I wouldn't walk into that room.

But that's me.

And I'm slowly realizing that those last three words matter more than I sometimes want them to.

Bonnie Doesn't Have to Make My Decision

Maybe Bonnie has a permanent medical condition. Maybe this isn't six months of chemotherapy that she can ride out at home. Maybe her alternative is spending the rest of her life avoiding restaurants, poker rooms, theaters, airplanes, parties and everything else involving other human beings.

Maybe she has decided that poker matters enough to her that she's willing to accept some risk while reducing it however she believes she can. I can disagree with that calculation. I can even think it's a bad calculation. What I can't honestly say is that I know everything that went into it.

And that's where grace starts getting uncomfortable. Grace is easy when I already agree with somebody. It gets considerably harder when I'm thinking, "This makes absolutely no sense."

Then There's Billy

Billy is an older guy who also wears a mask every time he plays. Billy is, shall we say, stoic and/or grumpy. He's generally pretty curt, and unlike Bonnie, he has never offered an explanation for why he still wears a mask. I've never asked him. I'm pretty sure he'd be aghast if I did.

And you know what? He's entitled to that. He doesn't owe me an explanation. I don't have to think wearing the mask makes sense. He doesn't have to submit a medical affidavit to play poker at the Moose Lodge.  (Though briefly we all did - we had to show proof of vaccination.  I have strong feelings on that, but that's a whole other blog post that I likely won't bother to write.  This post is about 2026 and where I'm at now.)

Back to Billy - the short of it is, we get along just fine.

That's an important distinction I've had to think about: I am entitled to my private judgment, but I'm not entitled to demand that somebody justify himself to me merely because he's doing something I find strange.  See what I did there?  Doing to others what they would not do for me only a few years ago is something that I work at, and ultimately am proud that I can do it.

And Then There Was Sheri

Sheri is interesting for a different reason. I've played poker with her since 2016. When poker resumed after the shutdowns, she returned wearing a mask. She continued wearing one for years.

At one point she announced at the table, quite emphatically: "I'm wearing this for the rest of my life."

Okay.

Then sometime in 2025, Sheri walked into the poker room without a mask. I almost didn't recognize her. And strangely enough, for a while I had less respect for her than I did for Bonnie and Billy.

Bonnie and Billy, whatever I think of their choices, are consistent. They're still doing what they apparently believe they should be doing. Sheri made a grand proclamation about what she was going to do for the rest of her life and then, inevitably, didn't do it.

But I've reconsidered that a little too. Because changing your mind isn't a character flaw. In fact, we desperately need more people who are capable of changing their minds.

What I would have appreciated from Sheri was just a little self-awareness. Nothing dramatic. No apology. No humiliation. Just something like: "Remember when I said I'd wear this thing for the rest of my life? Yeah, I might have gotten a little carried away."

That's it. I'd probably respect her more for saying that than if she'd never made the original declaration.

In the immortal modern phrase: "Woke 1 was crazy."

We all deserve the opportunity to have our own "Woke 1 was crazy" moment.  And unlike many of my conservative brethren who rolled their eyes or even flashed anger at AOC's recent glib retraction of policies that saw people fired and lives ruined - I'm willing to move on with even this very tiny admittance of guilt.

Why COVID Still Makes Me Angry

Part of what makes all of this difficult for me is that I still carry a fair amount of anger about the COVID years. I got vaccinated in the spring of 2021. I got a booster that October.

I wasn't an anti-vaccine guy.

But I remember what we were told. We weren't merely told that the vaccine might make COVID less severe if we caught it. We were explicitly told that vaccinated people were much less likely to become infected and less likely to spread the virus. Some public officials spoke with extraordinary certainty about it.

As time went on, breakthrough infections became commonplace. New variants changed the equation. Protection against infection waned. The most durable benefit of vaccination turned out to be initial protection against severe illness, hospitalization and death.

That's valuable. But it wasn't what we were sold in 2021.

And one of the things that damaged my trust wasn't simply that the understanding changed. Science is supposed to change when the evidence changes. It was the feeling that some of the original certainty was subsequently forgotten.  It felt like we had been lied to.

Suddenly the explanation became, "The vaccine was never supposed to prevent you from catching COVID. It was about keeping you out of the hospital."

Bullshit. I was there. I remember.

That's where I think institutions made an enormous mistake. People can forgive being wrong. It's much harder to forgive being told that something you distinctly remember happening never happened.  But then again, that is the lefty game all too often.

My Own Experience With COVID

I've had confirmed COVID at least three times. I also strongly suspect I had it in December 2019, although I'll never know. I was rather sick for about a week, which was incredibly unusual for me, and had several symptoms that we would soon come to associate with COVID. I never went to a doctor and wasn't tested, obviously, so I can't claim that one as fact.

The confirmed cases afterward were pretty mild. I'd get a sore throat, feel crummy for a few days, get congested and then recover. Each infection seemed milder than the previous one.

I was in my 50s and overweight at the time. I never remotely felt as though I was going to die. That doesn't mean COVID wasn't dangerous to other people. Obviously it was. Age, underlying conditions and immune status made an enormous difference.

Also, having a shit ton of other co-morbidities, and being an octogenarian or older had a lot to do with it.  Tons of folks died with Covid and not necessarily from it.

But my own experience inevitably affects the way I perceive the disease. Today, for me personally, I regard COVID as a nasty respiratory bug I'd rather not get. Someone else may reasonably assess his or her personal risk very differently.

There's that irritating concept again: Grace.

Grace Doesn't Mean Agreement

This is probably the biggest thing I've come around to. For a long time, I think I unconsciously treated grace as though it required agreement.

It doesn't.

I don't have to look at Bonnie wearing her mask at a poker table and think, "That makes perfect sense." It doesn't make sense to me. I don't have to admire Billy for wearing his mask. I don't.

I don't have to pretend I wouldn't find it slightly amusing if Sheri someday acknowledged her old "rest of my life" proclamation. I absolutely would. And I don't have to forget how angry I became at institutions I once trusted during COVID.

But none of that gives me permission to treat Bonnie, Billy or Sheri badly.

That's the line.

The Thoughts in My Head Aren't the Same as My Actions

This may be the hardest part for me to accept. Sometimes I see someone wearing a mask and my immediate internal reaction is: Oh, come on. It's 2026. Sometimes it's even less charitable than that.

I can't necessarily stop that first thought from appearing. What I can control is what happens next.

I can remind myself that I don't know why the person is wearing it. I can remind myself that another person's risk tolerance doesn't have to match mine. I can remind myself that somebody can make one decision I consider ridiculous without being a ridiculous person.

Most importantly, I can behave decently. I can say hello. I can joke around. I can deal the cards. I can lose a pot to Bonnie and congratulate her. I can take Billy's chips and try not to enjoy it too much. I can see Sheri sitting there without the mask she once promised to wear for eternity and resist saying, "Hey, weren't you wearing that for the rest of your life?"

That's not weakness. Maybe that's what being an adult in a society full of people who disagree with one another is supposed to look like.

I Don't Want Courtesy to Be Fake

There's one more uncomfortable part of this. I don't want to settle for merely being outwardly polite while internally despising everybody who sees the world differently. That's technically courtesy, but I'm not sure it's grace.

I'd like to get somewhere better than that. Not agreement. Not admiration. Understanding.

I can think Bonnie is making the wrong risk calculation while acknowledging that I don't know everything about her life. I can think Billy's permanent mask is bizarre while recognizing that he owes me absolutely no explanation for it. I can roll my eyes internally at Sheri's abandoned lifetime proclamation while also appreciating that she eventually changed her behavior rather than remaining trapped by something she said years earlier.

Maybe that's enough.

The Lesson I Wish We Had Learned

If there's one lesson I wish had survived COVID, it isn't about masks or vaccines. It's about certainty.

I want institutions to say: Show me the numbers. Tell me what you know. Tell me what you don't know. Don't exaggerate your certainty. Don't quietly rewrite what you told me before. And then let me make my own decision.

But if I'm going to demand that humility from institutions, maybe I owe some version of it to the people sitting across the poker table from me. Maybe I need to admit that I don't know everything either.

I know what Beverly and I did when she was immunocompromised. I know what I would do. I know what risks I'm willing to take. I know what I think about masks. They're all but useless for viruses. I know what I think about the COVID vaccine. It was a decent tool but not a miracle, and we were lied to about it over and over.

What I don't know is everything going on inside Bonnie's life, Billy's life or Sheri's head.

That's the space where grace has to live.

And I'm still working on it.

I'm not going to pretend that every choice deserves my admiration. It doesn't. I'm not going to pretend every belief deserves my agreement. It doesn't. I'm not even going to pretend I can stop myself from occasionally thinking, "That's ridiculous."

But I can refuse to turn that thought into cruelty. I can disagree wildly with somebody and still genuinely respect that person's dignity. I can be angry without being an asshole.

Maybe that's not sainthood.

But these days, I'll take it.