HARTFORD, Conn. — It was an anti-mask protest in Cheshire than pushed Brett Joly over the edge.
Joly, a middle school teacher in North Haven, had already grown frustrated with a group he saw as obstructing Connecticut’s attempts to control COVID-19. After watching protesters loudly and profanely harass Gov. Ned Lamont at a back-to-school event, he decided to, in his own way, shout back, typing a long and passionate comment on a Facebook page run by a leader of Connecticut’s anti-mask movement, begging that he tone down the rhetoric around face coverings in schools.
The response Joly received was dismissive and unsatisfying, and he was soon removed from the Facebook group, but he doesn’t regret speaking up.
“We’re in a ship, we’ve hit this rock called COVID, it’s affected the whole country, and we’re taking on water,” said Joly, who is running for Board of Education in Branford.
“And I feel like there are some of us saying, ‘Grab a bucket, get to work, let’s bail out the ship’ — and there are other people saying, ‘We didn’t really hit a rock, I don’t like the color of your pail, go back and get me one that’s wood.’”
After nearly a year and a half of denial and depression, as thousands have died and almost everyone has had life severely disrupted, residents in Connecticut and across the country appear to have entered the “anger” stage of pandemic grief.
Over recent months, as the state has suffered through yet another COVID-19 surge, anti-vaccine and anti-mask activists have grown increasingly fervent, culminating Aug. 25 in the protest that chased Lamont from the event in Cheshire. Meanwhile, residents who are vaccinated and dutifully wear their masks in public feel their own brand of anger, directed at those they believe to be prolonging the pandemic.
Anger, it seems, is everywhere.
Dr. Amy Arnsten, a neuroscience professor at Yale, studies cognitive disorders and investigates why people become incapable of restraining their emotions during highly stressful situations. Under chronic stress, like an ongoing pandemic, she said, prefrontal neurons can wither away. As a result of that deterioration, people can feel that they lack control of a situation and find it hard to regulate emotions like anger.
Losing those neural connections also makes it harder for people to evaluate information — and identify misinformation.
“Anger is often a natural emotional response to a frustrating situation, but under healthy conditions, our pre-frontal cortex can say, ‘This angry response is not helpful, and in fact it will make things worse, so chill,” she said. “If you have weaker pre-frontal, you are unable to regulate yourself and you act out of anger in ways that can be destructive.”
Anti-mask and anti-vax anger
Unvaccinated people make up a relatively small minority of Connecticut residents, and those who oppose masks in schools and other indoor settings are outnumbered as well. Both groups, however, have made their arguments with increasing volume and vitriol.
Last weekend at the Capitol, more than 100 anti-mask protesters demanded that Connecticut children be allowed to go maskless in school. They waved “Unmask our children” signs and accusing public officials of “medical tyranny.” The event came only days after protesters carrying those same signs had chased Lamont from his event in Cheshire with profanity and comparisons to Nazi Germany, screaming and knocking on his SUV as he attempted to leave.
Days after the Cheshire confrontation, Lamont was asked whether he thought the protesters’ minds could be changed.
