The anger stage: Frustration mounts as anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers get loud while those following the rules watch gains against COVID-19 erode

It was an anti-mask protest in Cheshire that 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.

“I’m not sure me sitting down and having a conversation is going to move some of these folks,” the governor said. “The anger was visceral.”

Down Washington Street from the anti-mask protesters last weekend, several dozen Hartford HealthCare employees gathered to protest the health system’s vaccine mandate. They shouted through megaphones at passing cars, demanding they be allowed to remain employed without receiving a COVID-19 vaccine.

One woman briefly argued with a police officer who asked her to step out of the road and onto the sidewalk. A few yards away, a man showed off a large banner reading, “Shove your vaccine up your ass.”

At one point, a man holding a flag adorned with a crude reference to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris stood near a group of protesters attempting to speak to the assembled crowd. When one of rally organizers asked him to move so as to not make the event overly “political,” the two began shouting at each other and firing insults.

The crowd’s mood brightened only when a small caravan of cars drove past waving flags that said “Trump won” and “F*** Biden.”

“We shouldn’t be forced to take this vaccine. We shouldn’t be forced to do weekly testing. We shouldn’t be forced to wear a mask because we haven’t taken the vaccine,” Liza Blanchette, Nachaug Hospital nurse, told The Courant. “All of this is coercion.”

‘I think that they’re selfish’

While Connecticut’s anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers have grabbed headlines, a similar frustration has built among another — much larger — group of people.

According to state numbers, 84% of eligible Connecticut residents are vaccinated against COVID-19. And according to survey results from the nonprofit DataHaven, 67% of Connecticut adults say they wear a mask very often or somewhat often when leaving their home.

For this largely silent majority, patience with holdouts and protesters is growing thin.

Joly, the middle-school teacher and Board of Education candidate, said he was scared watching video of the protesters in Cheshire, which made him think of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and other recent political violence.

“They have a right to their opinion that I don’t agree with,” Joly said of the protesters. “But when they verbally accost the governor of our state, that’s where I say it’s too much.”

With a patchwork of rules governing where to wear masks, disputes have become common. In Fairfield, where residents clashed over mask mandates at a local Board of Education meeting, First Selectwoman Brenda Kupchick has pleaded with residents “to engage in respectful and civil dialogue.”

“I even had a resident call to share with me that they have been receiving threatening messages,” Kupchick wrote in a recent post on the town website. “One caller went so far to wish COVID-19 upon this resident’s child, since they shared a different view on masks.”

Meanwhile, some vaccinated Connecticut residents blame those who have not yet been vaccinated for the state’s recent surge in cases and hospitalizations. In their view, the obstinacy of the unvaccinated minority has caused suffering for all.

“I think that they’re selfish,” said Tim Sperry, a 66-year-old Guilford resident who proudly argues with unvaccinated people on Facebook and Twitter. “I’m not very civil to them. I’m not polite, and I see no reason to be. I think that it’s selfishness run amok.

“This is a disease that is afflicting our community, and our community we have to do what we can to beat it back. And the best tool that we have right now is vaccination.”

Susan Campbell, an Ivoryton resident and lecturer in communications and journalism at the University of New Haven who writes a column for Hearst newspapers, said she has never felt much sympathy toward anti-vaxxers. In her view, people who dismiss masks and vaccines have “interpreted this in an immensely selfish way as a personal rights issue.”

Campbell said she is exasperated that they cannot join in the collective responsibility of ending the pandemic. This summer, as the pandemic dragged on and her husband was infected with a breakthrough case of COVID-19, that frustration came into sharp relief.

“What I wish people would understand is, by them saying ‘It’s my choice and I don’t have to get a vaccine,’ that’s like trying to say you can have a ‘No Peeing Zone’ in the swimming people,” she said. “You can’t. If you do not get vaccinated, that affects everyone.”

Campbell said she remains optimistic that Connecticut can move past this stage of the grief cycle, to find something beyond anger.

How that happens, though, she’s not quite sure.

“I don’t think my way of shouting and calling names is working out really well,” she said. “There’s different messaging that I can’t come up with.”

Eliza Fawcett can be reached at elfawcett@courant.com. Alex Putterman can be reached at aputterman@courant.com.