In December of 2021, I was nearly attacked in a Target.

This was nearly two years into the COVID pandemic and the world was slowly reopening.  (Since I live in Texas, my world reopened earlier than everyone else’s.  Despite the predictions of folks up north, who were almost gleeful in their predictions that Texas would be wiped out by people coughing on each other at football games, we survived.)  In 2020, my sisters and I couldn’t really celebrate Christmas the way we usually did because everything was closed.  In 2021, we were l0oking forward to making up for lost time.

What I was not looking forward to was wearing a mask.  Due to an ambitious politician named Clay Jenkins who was hoping to ride the COVID pandemic into the governor’s mansion, Dallas County still had a mask mandate.  The mandate was unenforceable due to Governor Abbott’s executive order but still, a lot of people in Dallas were masking up.  Sitting in the parking lot of Target, I told my three older sisters that I was not going to wear a mask inside the store.  I have asthma.  Having to wear a mask was more than just an inconvenience for me.  Wearing a mask made it difficult for me to breathe and, given that more and more health authorities were starting to admit that masks didn’t make any difference as far as the spread of the disease was concerned, I didn’t see why I should have to unnecessarily suffer.  My sisters said that they understood and that they would have my back if anyone said anything to me about my maskless state.  “But no one will,” my sister Megan assured me.

As soon as I stepped into the store, I heard it.

“GET A MASK ON HER!”

It wasn’t a store manager or a cop or any other sort of authority figure yelling.  It was an overweight, middle-aged woman riding around the store on her little scooter.  Apparently, she spotted me as soon as I entered the store and immediately started driving herself in my direction, yelling the entire time.  I couldn’t really understand the majority of what she yelled but I did manage to make out words like “Mask,” “kill all of us,” “selfish,” and a few others that I can’t repeat during Lent.

Again, because of Lent, I can’t tell you what my older sister Melissa said in response to her.  My sisters, all three of whom had been masked up, removed their masks in solidarity.  I wish I could say that the entire store applauded but most people were just trying to avoid looking at the fat banshee on her scooter.

Even after my sisters removed their masks, the woman continued to focus her anger on me, still yelling as I walked past her.  (I attempted to smile politely at her, which did not help the situation.)  Eventually, her voice faded away.  She either left the store or found someone else to yell at.

I tell this story to illustrate one point.  The COVID pandemic was a very strange time.  One can both acknowledge the very real tragedy of COVID while also acknowledging that quite a few people fell down the doom rabbit hole and allowed themselves to be driven mad by the constant drumbeat of government officials, members of the media, and other commentators telling us that everyone was going to die unless we wore masks and maintained a distance of 6 feet from each other.  Due to the COVID pandemic, businesses were forced to shut down.  People lost their jobs.  Families were not allowed to comfort each other.  In many states, students were not allowed to go to school.  To doubt any element of the government’s response to COVID meant running the risk of being listed as a “conspiracy theorist.”  Blue states started to gleefully keep track of how many died in red states.  Red states started to keep track of how many civil liberties were suspended by the blue states.  (We all should have been keeping track of their number of politicians who violated their own mandates and simply shrugged off the outrage.)  We were constantly told that we were in a war against the virus but if felt more as if the country was actually at war with itself and a lot of people seemed to be happy with that.

The documentary 15 Days opens with clips from a zoom meeting, in which Jane Fonda, Randi Weingarten, and a host of others discuss the pandemic as an opportunity to bring about social change.  The documentary goes on to document how the school shutdowns went from being “15 days to slow the spread,” to nearly two years of remote learning.  Parents discuss going from trusting the government and wanting to do the right thing to the growing disillusionment of realizing that “15 Days to Slow The Spread” was, from the start, an empty slogan.  Epidemiologists who opposed the school closings discuss being censored and dismissed as “fringe extremists.”  Student athletes talk about losing out on college scholarships.  We learn about the struggles of doing remote learning.  We learn how some students merely disappeared from the system.

As you probably already guessed, 15 Days has a political agenda and, as such, it won’t be for everyone.  Certain parts of it were certainly not for me.  (Personally, I think the film lets the Trump administration off too easily when it comes to the federal government’s COVID response.)  But that doesn’t change the fact that 15 Days shows just how much damage was done to an entire generation by the senseless and largely partisan-driven decision to shut down the schools in so many states.  In between clips of people claiming that “kids are resilient,” we get interviews with actual kids who lost two years of not just education but also social development to the shutdowns.  The contrast between what we were told was happening with remote learning and what actually happened is stark.  The director, a disillusioned and self-described “progressive Democrat” named Natalya Murakhver compares America during the pandemic to the totalitarian government that her family fled when she was a child and it’s hard not to feel that she has a point.

You may or may not agree with the film’s politics but, with each passing day, it becomes more and more obvious how screwed up the federal government’s response to the COVID pandemic truly was. Documentaries like this are important because right now, the gaslighting we’re seeing about what really happened in 2020 and 2021 is incredible.  Neighbors turned against neighbor (or shopper, as they case may be).  And an entire generation lost two of the most important developmental years of their lives.