Breakfalls and Easy Calls – How Masks Became Politicized

I was a rambunctious kid. On our yearly summer vacations to Cape Cod, my mother would hold her breath as I would swan dive off the dunes onto the sandy beach below. At home, I would leapfrog over the sofas in the living room replaying scenes from Star Wars while destroying a series of couches and lamps along the way. I climbed trees all the way to the top branches without a second thought, I popped wheelies on my bicycle without a care for my own safety, and I also had an older brother to wrestle with – I took my licks. Social services were almost called when my general practitioner questioned me as a six-year-old where my bruises had come from. My innocence revealed that our house was a loving one free of abuse, but where little effort was made to exorcise the daredevil inside of me.

In the hopes that it would help me let off some steam, my parents signed me up at the age of eight for judo classes that were being offered once a week at one of the neighbourhood schools. I was little by every standard and I had to become used to growing up in a world where everything was bigger than me. Being rambunctious helped me to cope in that world. I instinctively learned balance and developed core strength and through judo, I learned how to use my opponent’s size advantage against them. I was also already used to being hurt, so no opponent ever frightened me. Every year, I competed against kids who were older and outweighed me by 15 kilos and I still won all of my matches.

I can still remember my first day of judo and the very first lesson that we learned – the breakfall. It seemed so stupid at first as I watched my sensei launch himself into the air and come down colliding with the mat slapping his arms on the ground as he fell. It was silly but simple enough to reproduce. Our sensei then instructed us to perform the breakfall 20 times just as he had shown us. What a parent must have thought to see two dozen elementary school kids flopping around on blue mats like a school of fish and slapping the ground with all of their fury as they did I can only speculate, but performing 20 breakfalls after bowing and stepping onto the mat became an instinctual habit for me for three years and I became an expert at it. The lesson was invaluable and transferrable and helped me in every sport in which I competed. I was the guy who would go spilling to the turf and have every parent in the grandstand gasping with concern, only to bounce right back up and dust myself off as if nothing had happened, much to their surprise. “He bounces,” my mother used to say.

Fast forward 20 years and it only takes one broken leg to remind you just how quickly and easily the brain can become informed of real danger. It was innocent enough and connected to movements I had made and failed at a thousand times, but in that one instance, everything just went snap. There were times when I thought I would never compete in sports again and that my rough and tumble nature had, at last, been accidented out of me. There is an old adage that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger, but it is not at all true. My leg, now being held together with plates and screws is no stronger now than it was before, but my psychology was crippled in the mishap. If you let it, your behaviour can be shaped by a single moment of misfortune. I call this phenomenon “The Bicycle Helmet Rule”.

Around the same time I was letting off steam flopping around on the blue mats, I was also a menace on my bicycle on the streets of the suburb where I grew up. In elementary school, your bicycle was your means to independence and my friends and I rode ours everywhere – To and from school, to the depanneur for one-cent candies, to the playgrounds, and to each other’s houses because having somewhere to go was the excuse to hop on our bikes. I never had training wheels and learned to ride after several unsupervised controlled wipeouts from driveway to stop sign along my street. As long as I returned home at some point for chocolate milk, few questions were asked about why my elbows were bloody. We were not shy about being reckless or acrobatic on our bikes and we fell off them plenty and collected our share of scrapes along the way. Having worn-out knees on our jogging pants was not so much a fashion statement to our ten-year-old selves as it was a badge of honour and a statement to our peers, along with the bruised and bloody knees underneath, that we were cool with getting a little cut up.

How it happened exactly I can’t rightly pin down but, through high school as our symbol of independence was shifting from bicycle to automobile, it became against the law to ride a bike without a helmet. My theory goes that someone fell off of their bike, died, and the laws changed. The easy way to report it might be that studies showed that wearing bicycle helmets cut down on serious injuries by a certain percent. Whether riding a bicycle today is safer for a child than it was 30 years ago is not for me to say, but what I can say with certainty is it was common to ride helmetless back then and forbidden to ride helmetless now. Do today’s helicopter parents ensure that their children fall off their bikes less often? Do children learn how to fall off of their bikes the way they used to by doing it a thousand times? Are bloody elbows and knees the scars and the right of passage for every rambunctious kid like they used to be, or are those the symbols of neglectful absentee parents? I have no skin in the game, but I do know that the rules have changed and wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle is a very easy call to make.

I did eventually return to competitive sports when I moved to the west coast of Canada where I joined an elite soccer league for men aged 35 and older. It felt great to get my body back to the level of fitness that it once knew (or at least close to it) and I joined a team with a great group of guys, some of whom I had played with or against years earlier. But there were also strange and irksome things when it came to competing in that kind of environment. I hesitate to imagine what might happen were two amateur teams left to compete and police themselves, but it has always been deemed necessary that a referee at least be present to arbitrate any game between grown men. This was a league of competent players who, for the most part, have competed at the highest non-professional level in the country. But we are also Canadians aged 35 to 45 so we are not competing for anything more than to let out the frustrations that have built up over the week, to work up a sweat, and push each other to excel at our favourite sport. There are no delusions in our minds about our efforts on the day leading to a paycheque or a pro career. Still, every so often, someone shows up on the team you are playing against for whom this is the biggest game of their entire lives. They do not have the skill or sense that the rest of us have to compete at that level and therefore rely on projecting a different degree of commitment and effort to justify their inclusion. They misguidedly believe that it makes them valuable to their team but all it does is make the environment more dangerous for everyone on the field. They are rash and uncoordinated and make terrible decisions and more often than not, in their clumsiness, they end up injuring themselves while taking a couple of other people down along the way.

What is in the mind of a referee tasked with arbitrating those games in the cold and the rain of Vancouver in late January I have no idea but it does take a certain personality to take on that responsibility. My objectives for every game since breaking my leg have been: compete hard for my teammates, play well for myself, don’t overdo it, don’t get hurt, enjoy the game, and God-willing get a win. I like to think that that is everyone’s objective though the evidence suggests that I have been profoundly misinformed. A referee’s objective, on the other hand, is a mystery because it seems as though it extends only as far as: get paid and try not to have 22 burly men take their frustrations out on you.

Frustrating things happen all of the time in over-35 leagues because we have all begun to suck pretty hard at our sport of choice. Some of us used to be able to ping a ball 40 yards and drop it right on our teammate’s toe but instead now occasionally can only squib it along the ground spinning unnaturally out of bounds as we watch and wonder what happened to our once lithe and powerful bodies. A referee’s job should be about managing the frustrations of the players on the field by making astute decisions and establishing a framework for what is allowed and not allowed. That framework should contain an inherent logic that is built from everyone’s experience of the sport and that we have all inherently agreed to beforehand. Subsequently, the astute decisions that a referee needs to make during the match should stem directly from that tacitly agreed-upon framework. The rules of football are pretty simple, but interpreting those rules during the game can be tricky. It would be nice if all of the calls that a referee had to make were easy, but very often they are not. Two players can go off jostling for the ball and come crashing to the earth and it seems like a foul should be called but who should be penalized is a coin flip. Both players are going to get up from the ground and feel that the other person was the aggressor and it can be tough for a referee to make a call that both sides will agree with. Where the system breaks down is when a referee is unable to mete out equal judgement over aggression and defers to over-penalizing senseless easy calls.

We hate wearing shin guards but the rules mean we have to. Most of us slip shin guards that are designed for toddlers, some no bigger than a credit card, into our socks and it is common to wrap black wiring tape around our legs to keep them from moving around too much as we play. On one particular occasion, a referee forbade us from wearing the tape and the reason we were given was not all that convincing. According to the referee that day, it was the league rules that we should all have matching uniforms so we all had it to do it or none of us do it. We rolled our eyes and complied because to not do so would mean forfeiting the game because of stupidity. In that same match there was that one guy that just did not belong and, a quarter of an hour in, I felt it my duty to warn the referee to keep his eye on that player and to not let him get away with the way he was playing. He was always on the edge and throwing himself into dangerous situations forcing us to pull up from challenges we would normally win. You could just see that at some point he was going to throw everything at it and miss and someone was going to get hurt. 

Sure enough, the fish out of water clumsily and rashly went charging into the back of my teammate’s legs midway through the second half and did get a yellow card for his troubles. It was one of the most violent tackles I had ever seen and we all went running to our teammate’s aid and to give the player and his own teammates a piece of our minds. One of our players screamed at the referee, “That should be a fucking red card!” which earned him a second yellow and got him tossed from the game now leaving us down a man. When we asked why our player was the one being thrown out of the game we were told that the league rules state that there cannot be any swearing in a public space where children might be present. We were 35-year-old men playing on a patch of grass off the side of the autoroute on the weekend – I can assure you that no child was going within a kilometre of that sorry excuse of a soccer game – but it was an easy call for the referee to make and stamp his authority. I calmly approached the referee and reminded him that it did not make sense to penalize dissent more harshly than violence which earned me a yellow card for my own troubles for persisting with my questioning the referee’s decisions. Before we could finish the game we had to wait for a half-hour for an ambulance to arrive when, you guessed it, that poor guy who should never have been on the field to begin with had to be carted off to the hospital after breaking his leg and taking the shins of one of our guys in the process. What a mess.

Hard calls are exactly that, they are hard. But they are the difference between everyone going home happy and healthy or a game being totally ruined. There are some referees who regularly referee our games and do earn an amount of all of our trust. They don’t get it right every time, but overall they manage things and are receptive to scrutiny. In the heat of the moment, we have hurled vicious insults at them but they know that it is never about them and that grown men just get pissed off. They understand the nuances. They let you know when you are pushing them too far and remind us that they will not be pushed around. After matches, they are receptive to talking about what happened and reflecting on key incidents that eventually lead to a sort of overarching informal justice. Some of the referees call everything and some are happy to let a lot of things go, but what they all have in common over the less capable ones is an understanding that we were all men and that they are only a part of a larger democratic operation in which we are all involved.

As a kid, my mother and father were my referees. They gave me values and they scolded me when I was an idiot, but I was allowed to play. They also deferred to other competent adults to teach me right from wrong when they were not around while at the same time teaching me to respect those that had taken over in their absence. I took in information from everywhere whether it was school, friends, television, or anywhere else a kid can look to for instructions on how to operate in the world. You dip your toe in the water and decide to swim or touch a hot stove and recoil. Whenever I have seen parents hovering over their kids to prevent them from experiencing even the slightest bit of harm I jokingly comment, “But how will they learn what hurts?”

I was given a set of tools and gifts and learned how to seize control of the things I encountered in my environment and it was always a wonderful right of passage every time I took one step further into adulthood. I feel like I have grown to see this all change. I do not think the world is more dangerous than it used to be, but somehow it just feels like it is even though we have been working tirelessly to make it safer. Adolescent suicide seems to be on the rise along with school shootings; bullying, which used to be the key motivation for a father to spend time with his son, now has to have a zero-tolerance policy; and, if you believe the news, we are all getting concussed coming out of the womb. Is it just because I have grown up and I have replaced my kid fears with legitimate adult concerns? Maybe. But I think kids haven’t been taught how to perform a good breakfall in a long while and in trying to make the world safer we took the rights of passage away from the kids who are always looking to make strides and seize control. We may have reduced head injuries from biking accidents by some percentage points but we have also probably cut down on the pride of the scraped knees and elbows. This is why video games, especially violent ones, are so popular these days. You can have an opponent blow your head off from close range with a rocket launcher and you will just respawn. But you learn something each time someone wastes your avatar and when you play you always feel in control – it’s the softest and safest scraped knee you can ever experience.

What about the lives saved? It may sound like I am pro-tragedy. I am not, but I accept that they happen. If a cyclist is hit by a car, falls off his bicycle and breaks open his skull, I do not rejoice. But I think the lesson is not to say: “See, that is why you wear a helmet”, but instead should be: “Don’t drive like an asshole.” Similarly, if I hear about a child injuring themselves after behaving recklessly, my advice is not to tell them or others to just wear more padding, it is to advise them to stop behaving like an idiot or at least be prepared to deal with the consequences.

But where do the lines of asshole and idiot get drawn when it comes to human safety? How do we determine fault? We like easy calls and well-defined boundaries because it helps us to more easily assign blame as if we can adequately account for human stupidity. Easy calls allow us to strip away and ignore the nuances. The problem is that stupidity, in so many situations, can be so hard to measure and so hard to prove, and it allows us to defer our judgement to what we can easily measure and can easily prove.

Blame is fundamental to the fabric of humanity. Assigning blame has been so essential to our ability to cope within our environment that we have developed whole religions that extend from that one concept – Oddly, people are still fighting over it. When two players get into a tackle where they both fall down, each one will blame the other for being the aggressor. When there is a fender bender you typically have two drivers yelling at each other instead of one raising his or her hand and saying mea culpa. This is why we have a third party take in the information, arbitrate, and decide on an outcome to which everyone agrees in order to move on. The process can often be more gruesome than making sausage and piling the literature of legal documents on top of each other can reach to the moon as we have refined line by line every statute to account for every possible circumstance. Like attempting to slay the Hydra, with every court ruling, the pile of legal precedent extends further into the solar system despite all of it boiling down to a universal consensus that no one should behave like an asshole. Unfortunately, the world is full of assholes but it is never us because we can never look at ourselves that way. The asshole is always someone else.

Humans are a tribal species. Two players jostle for the ball and go to ground and get up prepared to resort to fisticuffs and teammates come rushing to their sides to defend the uniform more than the man. It is a competition and they are all concerned about the outcome after ninety minutes more than justice. Watching people watch sports can be as fascinating as watching the sport itself like when you see a fan reduced to the most obvious forms of hypocrisy where the rules in their mind are rigid when it benefits their team and bendable if they don’t. The tribe is bigger than the sport.

Since the spring of 2020, the wearing of masks, in principle, is meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus, keep infections down and ease strains on health care systems around the world. Instead, the mask has become the focal point of determining what tribe you belong to. It has become so important in people’s minds, whether they are for or against it, that coalitions get formed and any other considerations for tackling the problem of the spread of the virus are tossed aside. The mask is the bicycle helmet, the black tape, and the swearing on the field. It is the easy call that we love and is an easy way to identify our tribe.

If the media is to be believed, then someone who is whole-heartedly against wearing a mask might see someone who is pro-mask and determine that they are sheep; That they are afraid and that they stoke fear; That the person they are looking at is uninformed about the real grift going on around them and how their freedom is being taken away; They are elitist liberal snowflakes. Similarly, someone who is pro-mask might see someone who is against wearing a mask and jump to the conclusion that that person does not believe in, or understand, basic science; That they are a conspiracy theorist; They have right-leaning political views; They don’t care about others.

You can learn a lot about someone from their uniform except how to see them, first, as a person who broke their leg once upon a time and is now conditioned to be, whether it is toward an illness or their government, a little more cautious.

The real tragedy is that, in politicizing the issue of masks, we may have missed the opportunity to focus on making better, and more effective, hard calls. In the ultimate scheme of things, masks, in principle, are meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus, keep infections down, and ease strains on the health care system. But they are so low on the totem pole when it comes to their effectiveness in doing that when compared to other health measures like distancing, testing, tracing, and isolating in the event of becoming ill. Other health measures demand so many more questions. How do you effectively distance? I tested positive, but I feel fine, do I really need to isolate? Did I come in contact with anyone who tested positive? Do I know how I might have been infected? By being such an easy call, wearing a mask puts our minds at the forefront of safety and we need not ask deeper questions.

When I first travelled to Korea in 2002, I remember seeing people in the street or on the subway voluntarily wearing masks. When I asked a local who I worked with why people were wearing masks they told me it was likely because that person was sick. By their wearing a mask, others could identify them and then decide to keep their distance. The sick individual was also doing their part by taking precautions to not spread their infectious germs while allowing others to live their lives. As a Westerner used to riding the crowded subway in the dead of winter among a sea of sickly green faces, it seemed strange, but to them, it was common sense. Fast forward twenty years and the mask is not used for its potentially useful “Scarlet Letter Effect” but to lump individuals into two adversarial groups.

In football, a team’s captain usually wears a yellow armband to signify his role on the team. It is a way to show the referee that it is he, or she, who speaks for the team and it is a symbol of the team to everyone that he, or she, speaks for us. We had a chance to treat mask-wearing like the armband. We could have all been part of the same team if we made the right call about who was wearing it and why. The mask could have become a symbol of solidarity, like the captain’s armband, if its use was well understood, reserved for the infectious, and voluntary. The real trouble is that mandating that everyone wear one all the time sent the message that everyone is sick and infectious all of the time – trust no one. Mandated by a government, depending on your government and your relationship with that government, and the trust either strengthened your allegiance to the uniform or eroded completely.

The lasting effect of the polarization in attitudes to wearing masks as a public health measure has been the strengthening of each tribe. Instead of engaging in civil discourse and asking the question: “How do we want to live?” all that seems to matter is: “Whose side are you on?”. Because so many people are forced to remain indoors and so many of our analog social outlets have been stripped away, the platform for sharing and expressing ideas has gone digital. Instead of the civility of discourse of the agora, the social platforms where ideas are discussed have become warzones of inane memes and asinine 240-character attempts at humour that some find “insightful” or “quippy”. They are nothing but snap judgments predicated on a misguided, self-righteous, belief that those sharing them are wearing the right uniform.

Over the course of the year, Western governments have adopted some form of a mask mandate that is either relaxed or policed depending on where you are. It is usually sweeping in concept but arbitrary in practice. In areas where it is prudent to do so – subways, indoor markets, and airports – I have witnessed sensible high rates of compliance. In city streets, parks, and malls, it is more like 50-50. In places where there was no mandate, it was the exception. Case numbers in all places varied. In countries that saw heavy spikes, stricter measures were enforced and compliance with every health protocol across the board increased and was followed by a reduction in cases. It would be lazy to attribute all of that hard work to the mask but defenders of the uniform would love to do so. In areas that were particularly hard hit, the locals seemed to know and attitudes changed so behaviour changed. People’s attitudes are the hardest of hard calls because it is presumed that there is at least one asshole out there and that is all it takes to ruin things for everyone. But, generally, I have witnessed the people – not the government – even when they are at odds with each other, demonstrate that they know how to perform a well-measured breakfall.

Solidarity is a strange phenomenon but its potency seems to swell during a crisis. I am never more proud of humanity’s ability to care for one another than when in the midst of disaster. The pandemic, on the other hand, has brought out the worst in all of us where I have witnessed more schadenfreude than empathy. In some places, solidarity has not taken root because the community has not had its knees scraped and all of those communities yet to feel the burn are made to feel that they are suffering alongside those who have fallen off their bikes. Some folks have not had the baptism that others around the world have had. It only takes one broken leg to remind you just how quickly and easily the brain can become informed of real danger – this is how we learn what hurts. The real trick is to create a sense of solidarity outside of disaster and have it baked into the community cake. The route there, to quote Uncle Walt, is to “be curious, not judgemental”.