In the summer of 2020, as I have done every summer for the past 30 years, I commuted between my home in Kansas City and my cottage on Lake Erie in Chautauqua County, New York.
I was reminded of that summer when I came across a photo of a mandatory form that passengers from Missouri had to fill out before landing anywhere in New York state. At the time, Missouri was deemed a COVID “hot spot.” On the bottom of the form I wrote, “Under protest, self-destructive, wasteful, oppressive.” Walking through the Buffalo airport, form in hand, passengers heard a repeated message from Gov. Andrew Cuomo hectoring us about masks and social distancing. Before leaving the secure area of the airport, we all passed through a checkpoint manned by the men and women of the National Guard who were there to collect our forms.
Feeling more rebellious than usual — I had been rebelling since Day One of the lockdown — I chose to run the gauntlet without handing in my card. As I walked past the guardsmen, eyes straight ahead, I imagined myself an East German refugee at Checkpoint Charlie conning his way into the West and waiting to hear someone bark out the last word he would ever hear, “Achtung.” (It helped that at the time I didn’t know what Achtung meant. It just sounded right.) In any case, no one said anything. Score one for the resistance.
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