Look on the bright side; maybe they’re just a**holes

An armchair analysis of the people who don't observe social distancing guidelines...

Not long ago Dr. Deborah Birx – White House Corona Task Force member and Trump Administration scarf model – had this to say about protestors who weren’t wearing masks or observing social distancing guidelines:

“It’s devastatingly worrisome to me personally, because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or an unfortunate outcome they will feel guilty for the rest of their lives.”

In my opinion, Dr. Birx is wrong.

Not about the chances of contracting COVID-19, then coming home and knocking off Gamma or Pop-Pop with a poorly-timed sneeze; she’s wrong about those people feeling guilt for the rest of their lives.

In my experience – and I’ve got some – self-centered jerks don’t feel guilt about anything. They do what they feel like doing and if it happens to screw somebody else over, so what?

They’ll rationalize that it was clearly grandma’s time to go and just keep behaving in the same self-centered manner that knocked off a supposedly-loved one. If these people were capable of feeling guilt or remorse, they’d change their behavior and quit being jerks, but they don’t.

That’s because – and this is only a theory, but it’s a good one – to the 100 percent, solid-gold jerk, the rest of us aren’t real. We’re just cardboard cutouts, populating their world and getting in their way at the grocery store or not responding quickly enough when the light turns green or keeping them from going to a bar and breathing on each other.

That’s why these people feel it’s OK to honk at us or yell at us or treat other people like crap; in their universe, we just don’t matter.

Traits of a psychopath

I have no idea how your mind works – I don’t even understand mine – but I have a tendency to skip from thought to thought; one idea leads to another, so see if you can follow my train of thought assuming I can get it to pull out of the station.

(Hey, it’s early and I’m still waking up.)

As I understand it, wearing a mask does a better job of protecting other people from you than you from other people. Wearing a mask prevents you from spraying droplets that might contain the COVID-19 virus into the air.

So if I wear a mask in a public place I’m doing it for you and if you don’t wear a mask in a public place you’re basically telling me to go screw myself. If you get me sick, it’s my problem.

I started wondering what kind of person feels OK about doing that and my first thought was a psychopath, so I looked up the traits of psychopaths and here’s what I found:

• Socially irresponsible behavior

• Disregarding or violating the right of others

• Inability to distinguish between right and wrong

• Difficulty with showing remorse or empathy

• Tendency to lie often

• Manipulating and hurting others

• Recurring problems with the law

Geez…sounds like some presidents I know.

On the other hand, I’m under the impression that when it comes to the Twilight Zone that is our mind, things aren’t quite as black and white as the TV show of the same name.

At times we might all engage in some of the behavior on that list, but that doesn’t necessarily make us psychopaths (I hope). “Normal” isn’t an absolute; it’s a range of behavior that we’ve decided is acceptable and we should all keep in mind that what’s considered acceptable is pretty damn fluid.

Protestors screaming about their rights make it more acceptable for somebody else to walk in a grocery store not wearing a mask, which in my personal experience, seems to be happening more often.

My next thought was maybe it was going a little far to label these people psychopaths, so what’s next on the emotionally-screwed up spectrum?

Traits of a sociopath

When I think of psychopaths I think of Anthony Perkins dressed up like his mom and stabbing Janet Leigh in the shower, so next I looked up traits of a sociopath and here’s what I found:

• Glibness and superficial charm

• Manipulative

• Grandiose sense of self

• Pathological lying

• Lack of remorse, shame or guilt

• Shallow emotions

• Need for stimulation

OK, this list of traits came way too close for comfort and I had to console myself with the thought that maybe I do some of that stuff some of the time, but I don’t do any of that stuff all the time and I’m hoping you can relate.

We all do selfish stuff on occasion, so the real question is how often do we do it?

Plus, I feel remorse, shame or guilt pretty much 24 hours a day, so if I’m a sociopath, I’m pretty lousy at it.

Turns out the more I looked into what makes people behave so selfishly the blurrier the lines got; isn’t there one all-purpose diagnosis that sums up all this self-centered behavior?

I’m glad you asked.

One of my all-time favorite cartoons

I have no idea why I can’t remember important things and trivial stuff is burned into my brain, but that’s the way it is and this is one of the things that’s stored in the cobweb-filled attic of my mind.

I saw this cartoon decades ago, but it’s still one of my favorites.

The scene was a psychiatrist’s office and the guy on the couch looked angry and tense and the psychiatrist was staring off into space looking pensive; like they’d tried everything and this guy on the couch wasn’t getting any better and was pretty pissed off about it.

The psychiatrist says:

“My secretary has an interesting theory…she thinks you’re just an asshole.”

And there you go: one diagnosis that takes all the possible personality disorders and wraps them up into an understandable package.

So maybe the social distancing protestors who think it’s OK to walk around in public without a mask or wave a gun around in a statehouse or make a show out of touching stuff in a grocery store or any of the other antisocial behavior we’ve seen, aren’t psychopaths or sociopaths.

Maybe they’re just assholes.