Scorecard: America Has Vaccines. Canada Has Fear

Agoraphobia: n. In pathology, a dread of crossing open spaces, such as open squares, city parks, etc.: The fear of uncontrolled social conditions.



The news that Covid-19 mask mandates in the United States are being lifted for fully vaccinated people marks a significant turning point for the pandemic and for sports in America. (In Canada it now appears that due to prime minister Justin Trudeau’s abject failure to acquire sufficient vaccines, fall is the earliest for the same liberation.)

With major retailers such and Wal Mart and Trader Joe’s giving the okay for vaccinated customers to resume normal massless lives, it now appears that it be will okay for fans to return to stadiums and arenas. And the six-foot spacing (the CDC now admits that three feet was sufficient all along) will also be phased out. Buh-bye cardboard cutouts.

While Canadian cops still chase people in parks or hustle kids out of playgrounds, Americans are poised to enjoy freedom at last from the scourge of  Covid-19. There will be a new appreciation for the simple freedoms citizens enjoy.

But the major question to be answered is what has the experience of draconian Covid lockdowns left behind besides scarred lungs and deleted memorial ceremonies? Specifically, is fear, as cultivated so assiduously by the media, politicians and healthcare  the real long-haul impact of the virus?

It’s clear a segment if the population will never recover from the spectre of the disease, the uncertainty of its arrival, the ability to fight it off with immune systems or even vaccines. The Church Ladies of infection still hold high court with their disaster scenarios and their public shaming of the infidels who believed all along that you weren’t going to get sick standing on a beach for strolling through a park.

The answer today is no clearer than it was last April 27 when we raised the question of how fear may have changed everything about the sports-going experience.

“Knowing what we know now following our graduate course in second-hand epidemiology is it also likely that people are going to flock back to the public arenas and stages? That they will transition from scared shitless to devil-may-care in a week? With people from the U.S. president through to the heavy hitters in public health saying that the hand shake is done after five millenia of use, how interested are people going to be in sitting six inches, not six feet, from some over-refreshed football fan or a Grateful Dead aficionado whose shower hasn’t been working?

The notion that the public— particularly the fussy Canadian public— is going to forgive and forget the virus scare is a huge assumption at this point. For instance, having seen the success of the NFL’s virtual 2020 draft, what are the odds that corporations and sports organizations opt for safer, tech-based gatherings with no chance of being sneezed upon? 

Or that fans might not just choose to put their feet up at home with friends and a 100-inch TV screen to catch their sporting heroes at play? They now know another pandemic is inevitably coming when Covid has gone— it’s just a question of when. So why hasten that day?

Let’s examine a few more post-Covid assumptions that are likely to affect whether fans heard out to the ballpark or concert hall. Public transit. We’ve been lectured for decades by woke urban types that sprawling suburbs and cars with single drivers are the road to climate hell. They’ve promoted public transit and stacked living in their lectures in the SJW media. It was considered bad form and bad climate conservation to use the fossil-fuel formula. 

But after seeing the New York subway or other famed mass-transit system become a trampoline for spreading the virus, how many fans are going to hop aboard the GO train or the SkyTrain with thousands of others to attend an event? It says here that for the foreseeable future people will opt to drive places or else work from home. 

The only people cramming themselves onto public transit will be the ones with no options. But they don’t generate enough income to support the massive networks of trains, buses and subways in the modern metropolis.

Further, in the wake of Covid’s killer embrace and the hysteria it produced will fans be inclined to travel to out-of-town games or championship contests if it requires air travel and staying in hotels/ motels? The masked reality of air travel in the future is sure to discourage a segment of the fan base. And how much will fans want to risk that the room they’re staying in is properly cleaned or the person changing the pillow cases hasn’t just arrived from Wuhan or Ebola?

The production and safety of the food chain has been another issue of concern during Covid. Who will be lined up at the food concessions in the stadiums or theatres unless they can be assured the food and, even more, the servers aren’t hosting a buffet of germs and virus?

We are about to discover that resuming life as it was is something trickier than first thought. With the toothpaste out of the tube can we be assured that a population petrified of someone getting within six feet will suddenly do a Bobby Ewing and pretend it was all a bad dream?”

Further, when fans get past this inhibition, will they notice that pro sports took the opportunity of the pandemic to politicize their games? Between the corporations who sponsor pro sports, the BLM radicals who permeate rosters and the networks, the last 15 months has sent a steady political message to its fans saying that they are white privileged yahoos unfit to shine the shoes of the Woke folk.

Once the novelty of returning to games passes, will the middle-class flock to games as they once did? As we asked last July 27, how will fans react when the millionaires that play for their entertainment say, We hate you, now come back home? 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx