Remember in March when we all were told to go on ‘git inside because the COVID was coming, and we all bought yarn and bought sourdough starters from the back of minivans at Preston Center and had Very Grand Plans of living that Laura Ingalls Wilder life, complete with the not having any toilet paper?
Yeah I am officially over that, and I’m about to go HAM on some of y’all because you are out of your ever lovin’ minds.
Listen, and come a little closer to this screen so I can say it right in your face: Wear a dadgum mask.
I don’t care if you have some weird tie in to personal freedom and masks. You need to go sit right over there in that thinking chair and think some thinks because this isn’t about you.
It’s about the fact that I would like to eat a steak at Al’s without sliding it under a mask. It’s about all the adorable children who would like to see their friends and maybe slide down the planters at NorthPark again. It’s about the people who will probably die of this ish if a whole bunch of us don’t realize that our personal freedoms, as law school and Jesus taught me, end when they connect with another person’s nose. Or lungs. Or sense of taste.
Or something. I’m really cranky right now and I cannot pretend anymore that my backyard is Paris. It is not Paris. It isn’t even Paris, Texas. I don’t even know what day it is. I wait for executive editor Joanna England to email me and remind me that it’s Tuesday and the next day is Wednesday, and then I write the things.
I mean, what about my personal freedoms? Do you realize I am not a teacher, but I’m probably gonna be forced to decide between sending my children to school with other germy children whose parents may or may not have been as diligent as we have been, or sitting in my kitchen for the rest of my natural born life (give or take a semester) making sure my cherubs are looking at the Zoom screen and not using their newly-honed Canva skills to create signs to sell their siblings?
Wear a danged mask. IDK if we will find out tomorrow that COVID was some conspiracy George Soros made up in the bathtub one night while he was eating cheeses made from goat milk he personally stole from mama goats while staring evilly into the faces of the cute little baby goats who needed the milk, openly mocking them for being young and too dumb to know how to fight back.
Wear a danged mask.
There were 445 new cases of COVID yesterday, and there have been something like 17,000 cases since this whole thing started. Chances are, you’ve been served by, stood next to in line, or deliberated avocados next to someone who was in the early stages of coming down with it.
And no, the mask doesn’t protect you as well from COVID if you’re the only one wearing one. But it protects other people if you’re pre-symptomatic. So that makes wearing one an exchange of kindness. You wear one to keep the people around you safe, they wear one to keep you safe, and together we work as a community to slow the spread.
That makes it kind of a “not a butthead” badge. Everyone wants to be “not a butthead,” right? Wearing one makes you the person in the group project that does your part of the research and contributes the important paragraphs. Not wearing one makes you the guy who never comes to any of the group study sessions but gets the A everyone else worked for.
In short, if you want things to go back to normal, wear a mask. Don’t do unnecessary things with crowds. Stay six feet away from people you don’t live with. The sooner we all look at this as something we’re doing as part of a social contract (like wearing pants in public and waving when someone lets you over in traffic), the sooner we can all go back to whatever normal was before this became the new normal.
Wear a mask.
