On Monday, a Florida federal judge, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, struck down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mandate requiring masks while traveling on planes, trains and automobiles, assuming the last of those is an Uber or a cab. She declared the regulation an overreach of government power.
In divided America, the news was greeted with a predictable binary of alarm and glee: many passengers and a White House spokeswoman expressed dismay, but some pilots even announced the change in the middle of their flights Monday, causing delighted customers to de-mask triumphantly at 30,000 feet.
Local media, rushing to airports such as Chicago’s O’Hare International to acquire comment, could find someone to say pretty much whatever they wanted them to say. At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, endless as it feels, the arguments are well known and well worn.
So. Let’s review. We’ll first stipulate some concern that the federal judiciary is, as Jeffrey Toobin noted Monday, increasingly looking as polarized as the rest of America. “Democratic and Republican judges live in different worlds and rule differently,” Toobin tweeted. And there is indeed reason to worry about that. We need federal judges to be nonpartisan and finding the sensible center.
But when it comes to masks on airplanes, consider the comment made to The New York Times by JetBlue founder David Neeleman: “If the government can decide they can have the State of the Union address without masks, then we certainly should be able to let people have that choice on an airplane,” he said.
No reasonable person, given the existence of superior air-filtration systems on airplanes and the lack of any research pointing to widespread transmission of the virus in flight, can argue with that. If you are for masks on planes, you must be for them at the State of the Union.
That sense of being singled out is why the major airline carriers with Chicago hubs, such as American, United and Southwest, all instantly dropped the requirement. Mask policy always has been shot through with hypocrisy and, as was proven by the current situation of fines and wrist slaps in the U.K., those making the policies have proven singularly unable to follow them.
While it’s true that air travel was one of the reasons why COVID-19 was able to spread so easily from China to Europe to the U.S. and beyond, the virus is everywhere. As writer Nate Silver noted Monday, it’s not a logical argument to campaign for masks on planes on those grounds. Once other restrictions were dropped, making it possible to go from a plane to a crowded, maskless bar or eatery, the retention of the policy for this narrow sector of life became absurd. People spend a lot more time in restaurants than on planes.
There is another reason to drop the mandate, of course: It has caused chaos. And that has required flight crews to police behavior in a way for which they are not trained nor compensated.
Americans who have fought compliance with this mandate have been wrong. They should have quietly followed the law, not made a fuss and delayed flights. But the tinderbox it has created, especially in recent weeks, has also been a threat to public safety. Few flight attendants will miss the need to walk down the aisle, scolding people whose mask has slipped down below their nose, especially since their colleagues at foreign airlines mostly were relieved of that obligation weeks or months ago.
Is there still an argument for masking up as you take your middle seat? Darn right, there is, ideally with a KN95, especially if you are older or have other health issues that make you especially vulnerable to an infection. Add such protection to that fine filtration system and you have done the best you reasonably can to protect yourself. Many of us will doing precisely that. And we urge those who disagree with someone else’s personal choice to silence their mouths at minimum and, ideally, to ask a seat mate if they would prefer the person in the aisle seat wore a mask. There was a time when Americans routinely offered such courtesies.
But the time has come to remove the mandate from this one sliver of life, and we see little point in the Biden administration appealing the decision. It’s time for people to do the right thing for themselves and to recognize that others may look at the risks involved and make a different choice.
And be kind to your front-line flight attendant. It’s all been terrible for them, for a long time now.
