A Soviet citizen goes to the dentist. He lies back in the chair. The dentist tells him to open wide.

“But I’m afraid to open my mouth,” he replies.

The old joke has a new resonance in the age of lockdowns and masked pedestrians, cancel culture and self-criticism sessions when Americans are the ones fearful of opening their mouths. Fear is the common denominator. A nation has spent the year holding its breath. And waiting.

Americans used to laugh at Soviet anecdotes without really understanding them. Now Americans are too afraid to laugh because they are coming to understand them all too well.

Mobs stalk the streets of American cities loudly bellowing, “We can’t breathe!” Sometimes they shoot or stab someone who then actually can’t breathe. Or they set a building on fire and anyone breathing in the smoke quickly discovers what it’s like to really be unable to breathe.

When you actually can’t breathe, you can’t shout and you can’t tell anyone. The people who actually can’t breathe or speak are the victims of the ones shouting that they can’t breathe.

There are two reasons why people can’t open their mouths or breathe, as in the joke with the Soviet dentist, literal and figurative. In a year when mouths are being shut with masks and censorship, the literal and the figurative things that people are afraid of have come together.

2020 is one long Soviet anecdote in which the only people allowed to disregard social distancing by gathering to protest in the thousands and tens of thousands do so to complain about their oppression. It’s a mock dystopia in which corporate CEOs berate their employees about their privilege and fire anyone who won’t confess their privilege, and government officials and agencies lecture the people they rule at length about the terrible evils of systemic racism.