We’ve entered one of the most dangerous stages of our pandemic. It’s about a month into our lockdown, and there is some evidence that social-distancing protocols are working. The curve is flattening. Of course, it could always be flatter … Still, we should welcome this news as good and evidence that we ought to continue listening to epidemiologists.

Yet all of the usual broken-brain loudmouths on the political right are paradoxically using the lower fatality numbers as evidence that thIS WUz aLl a LiBURal HoAx all along, and now they’re even coming out to gather publicly in protest by exposing themselves to potential contact with the virus. What they’re actually protesting is somewhat unclear to me. Are they trying to preserve their right to get as sick as they want and put others’ lives at risk as well? Only in America is the right to be as dumb and ignorant as you please seen as the highest value by at least half of the voting population.

These people are mad (we all are) but they don’t really seem to understand why. After all, these are the same people who protest Earth Day by letting diesel trucks idle and who burn sneakers they’ve already paid for because they don’t like it when their sports stars remind them that societal injustice exists. You get the sense they might stick their heads in ovens if it sufficiently annoyed liberals. The only consistent thread to their animus is a need to be deeply angry about something, and that something is whatever executives at Fox News have determined it should be.

The climbing world, fortunately, is a far happier place, though we are not immune to our own varieties of bad thinking. As if a microcosm of some of these larger societal divisions, the climbing world has broken into two groups: Those who have stopped climbing, and those who have pretended to stop climbing.

It seems as if many climbers are doing their part to help us get past this virus with as few fatalities as possible and without overwhelming our hospitals. Many climbers seem to be following the general wisdom that staying home is the best things we can all be doing right now, and the quickest way we can get past this.

But, at least for the Pretenders, it’s not immediately obvious that we shouldn’t be climbing at all. And because many of the reasons for why we shouldn’t be climbing right now are somewhat flimsy (as I will discuss below), I fear that much of the progress made over the past month is in danger of being lost as people, from Trump’s cult army of protesters to climbing’s pandemic Pretenders, decide that they’ve all had enough and want to keep living their normal lives and fuck everyone else.

First, a tangent on the Pretenders. To be clear, their charade is entirely an outgrowth of self-defeating patterns and habits relating to social media. For where else would one even feel the need to pretend but within a context in which you have trained yourself to adopt this pathological habit of making every detail about your life public, but are then afraid of the backlash that would ensue from admitting that you’ve continued to climb as much as you want all along. In other words, you can’t stop posting, but you don’t know what to post—so you pretend you’re not climbing by sharing archival photos or subject us all to IG Live training videos, which are more boring than actually hangboarding.

The people who are accustomed to sharing photos of their trips, whips, and sends daily and receive a smack of endorphins from the likes and comments piling in, now face a catch-22: They want to keep sharing their climbing lives on social media, only they can’t talk about it out of the fear they will be shamed by The Scolds, the climbers who have fallen into a role of policing the climbing internet and being extremely vocal about why everyone should be staying the fuck home. (And as much as I love the word fuck, for some reason the addition of it in this context has been one of the most grating developments of this pandemic.)

So now it’s the Pretenders vs. The Scolds. Hard to say who is winning, but one thing is for sure. It’s hilarious to see this internecine dynamic play out on the internet.

The Scolds are insufferable for obvious reasons. No one likes the hall monitor, especially the hall monitor who loves his job. But it’s not as though the Pretenders are immune from contempt either. They seem to embody the attitude of “rules apply to you, not me.” The Pretenders who are finding themselves standing at barren crags and empty boulderfields and correctly surmising that this can’t possibly be doing any harm are only correct because it is only they who have chosen to break the rules and not everyone else. There is a certain ugliness to people who don’t feel bad about this.

But … they have a point, too. After all, we can still go outside. People here in Colorado are hiking and skiing in the backcountry in limited, safe-ish capacities. Why not also climb?

It’s about time that someone said that most if not all of the arguments for a complete ban on climbing feel flimsy. Consider the argument for taking no needless risk (i.e., going climbing) because you may get hurt and have to go to the hospital thereby extracting resources that should otherwise go to covid-19 patients. At best this argument contains logic for exercising more prudence, but I don’t necessarily see it as the good argument for a total cessation of all climbing activities. Perhaps Evilution isn’t the smartest project currently…but you’re saying no one can chuck a lap on the Ironman Traverse, too?

Traveling to climb is clearly a bad idea because traveling is how the virus spreads. We shouldn’t be taking trips and making long-distance drives just to go climbing—no question.

But why can’t nearby cliffs remain open to locals who don’t have to travel long distances to reach them? Besides, if social distancing protocols can be adhered to in grocery stores, then certainly they can be adhered to at crags…

That said, successfully adhering to social distancing protocols at cliffs will require new norms of behavior and crag etiquette. Will climbers be willing to turn around and go home, or go to a different wall, if they arrive at a crag and X number of people are already there? And what is “X?” There’s a lot we still don’t know about the disease, which is a good argument for adhering to an abundance of prudence.

Everyone has been asking the question of “When will this be over?” but as The Atlantic recently stated, the better question is “How do we continue?” because this isn’t going to be over anytime soon.

For climbers, what would social distancing look like in practice? Are typically crowded crags to be avoided? Are the days of sessioning boulders with a dope-ass crew over? Should we just wear masks and sticky-rubber condoms on our fingers?

Or will the new norms be a continuation of the present: shaming enough people into never climbing such that it’s safe enough for the shameless Pretenders to get their pitches in without doing much harm?