On this temperate, sunny day in Australia, I rushed to make the 3pm catch up with my double vaccinated best friend of thirty years, Imad.
“I have to go. Imad is going to see my new ginger hair. He’s going to freak out,” I grinned to my wife.
She laughed at me.
Reaching Narellan shopping center fifteen minutes late, I messaged Imad on the brisk walk to the entrance doors. He soon appeared.
“Hey. How are you doing,” we shook hands, and turned to mount the travelator up.
I consciously decided not to wear a face mask indoors today. I had read some unsavoury news articles about the treatment of the unvaccinated in Australia during our second emergence from lockdowns in New South Wales. I wanted to stand in solidarity with the protesters. I was pro-choice.
As we casually chatted, I stuck out like a sore thumb among the face mask wearers of the packed mall. I didn’t mention my pro-choice anti-mask stance to Imad. His pupils did dilate briefly, but he otherwise did not care.
“Did you dye your hair?” Attention turned to my botched ginger brown hair color, compliments of the New South Wales covid-19 lockdowns seeing hairdressers closed with little government support since late June 2021 for nearly four months.
“Yeah. I tried to dye it blonde, but the blonde didn’t come out fully. I’ve gone ginger.”
We walked through the mall, the halls brimming with all the young, fertile youth of the local area.
Imad posed, “Where do you want to go? How about the coffee shop outside, downstairs? Max Brenner.”
“We could order a coffee and walk around, but okay, we can go to Max Brenner.”
The Mandatory Face Mask Altercation
A sense of confrontation already brewed in my mind on our walk through the outside courtyard beyond the large fountain features washing in the sunshine behind us.
We had visited Max Brenner a week ago also during the covid-19 lockdowns while the vaccine mandate was in action, and nothing was said.
Still with no face mask on, we entered into Max Brenner. Three young, female baristas were behind the counter, while two separate tables were occupied with sit-down patrons.
“Those patrons must have had to show their vaccine certificate to sit down,” I figured.
We approached a dainty young female barista, with dark brunette hair in a ponytail.
“Can I take your order,” she looked towards us two bulky, middle-aged lads.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a voice from behind the counter to the right blindsided me.
“You need to put your face mask on!”
A stock teenage female with short blonde and pink spiked hair snapped in a confrontational, bellicose voice, stomping forward towards her side of the counter like a wild dog.
I immediately got angry, snapping back intensely, “Why? What for?”
“You need to wear a face mask! It’s a condition of entry,” she jutted.
I could not believe I was having an altercation with what looked to be a teenage lesbian in Max Brenner.
At that point, I was thinking about walking out in protest. Imad looked shocked. The diners could be seen turning a glance in our direction.
I put the face mask on, and then immediately lowered it under my nose and mouth.
The aggressive mother hen teen turned back around, busying herself with work, as the other two female baristas constantly looked down, petrified to make eye contact with these two unlikely threats.
“Look. I still got my face mask on,” I smirked to Imad.
Deescalating The Conflict With Toxic Staff
With the confrontation over mandatory face masks behind us, the original dark brunette barista took our order from Imad.
I stood there with fuming eyes, holding my temper, trying to keep calm.
The confrontation over face masks in a coffee shop made me feel upset. As I looked around feeling somewhat ruffled, I could see no logic in being made to feel like a criminal for exercising my own judgement. The only person within three meters of me was Imad. Is the barista trying to protect my fully vaccinated best friend from his completely healthy, covid-19 free buddy? We were both healthy. It made no sense.
When Imad finished ordering the takeaway coffee, we both stepped backwards.
“You look angry,” he remarked.
“Do I? I feel normal.”
I must have had wild eyes.
We talked loudly about the covid-19 vaccine mandates. The irony was that with Imad being fully vaccinated and healthy, and me being unvaccinated and healthy, despite how we were both healthy with no trace of the covid-19 virus ever in our bodies, only he was allowed to dine in.
In my mind, I was livid. This girl could not be older than eighteen years. I’ve lived on Earth two times longer than her.
When I was 18 in Australia, I was just grasping politics. John Howard was the first politician I remembered back in those days. I had only just begun to understand how there were two sides in government.
These kids don’t understand much about Australian society at that age. They blindly follow orders without questioning them, like the Chinese Communist Party members who obey the party line, like the Nazis who forced people to follow their orders until the Germans were eventually brainwashed to do as the party said.
To me, it was no win. I feel like saying to that lesbian teenager with the dirty, bleached blonde hair, “I fought for your freedoms already. Now you need to help me fight for mine.”
Australia has clear lines of segregation drawn up across business and government ranks regarding covid-19. This is the kind of discrimination an unvaccinated Australian in a vaccination passport landscape cops now on a daily basis.
Despite the arbitrary divide, we carried our coffees outside Max Brenner, across to sit on marble steps facing the fountain, to continue our day.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
