There's a glaring omission from this discussion about why people “can’t quit” pandemic behaviors: the mental and emotional toll of the last year. After what many have been through—death, grief, isolation, stress, anxiety, unemployment, trauma—people are going to have some feelings around transitioning back to a less cautious way of life. This doesn’t mean that they reject the CDC guidelines or are wielding progressivism as a weapon. It means some people need a little extra time to put their masks away as they stroll around the park—and they should take it. Especially since, broadly speaking, on a policy level, states are opening up, and have concrete plans to continue doing so in the coming months. If anyone is being overly cautious, it's happening on an individual level, and—unlike the individual choice to not get vaccinated—it's an individual behavior that doesn't incur any meaningful risk for others. An especially cruel element of being told you're not moving on fast enough is that all of the usual ways of grieving were put on hold last year, or severely truncated. “As the rest of vaccinated America begins its summer of bacchanalia, rescheduling long-awaited dinner parties and medium-size weddings, the most hard-core pandemic progressives are left, Cassandra-like, to preach their peers’ folly,” Green wrote.