I made a rare trip to the grocery store last week. In preparation, I popped on a homemade mask (thank you crafty friends!) before heading straight to the produce department. And that is where I got my first official eyeroll from “Unmasked guy.”
He could barely contain his contempt. At first, I thought he was just super exasperated at the price of pole beans but then I realized he was unhappy with my mask.
Honestly, he couldn’t have looked more irritated if I had been out front handing shoppers “Save the Murder Hornets!” pamphlets.
Maybe he was upset because he thinks the media has blown this pandemic out of proportion and, as a highly trained epidemiologist, he just doesn’t get it.
Yeah, that must be it.
The whole thing unnerved me and that caused me to breathe heavier and that caused my glasses to completely fog up and…well, first world problems.
I don’t get the angry anti-mask movement out there. By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the rage directed at Costco for requiring all customers to mask up before entry.
The nerve! What’s the point of being in an exclusive membership club if you’re going to be treated like this?
Shouldn’t membership have its privileges as in the God given right to shed virus and spray droplets on others?
Remember what it says on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free in Costco.”
The debate rages on Facebook (“where old people scream at the people they went to high school with”) as the anti-maskers swap theories about how the virus is the brainchild of (A) Bill Gates, (B) the Illuminati or (C) contrails/cell towers/Hillary. Anti-maskers, we wear the mask to protect YOU so let’s drop the “first they came for our bare noses and mouths” attitude. I know you’re tired of eating at home and beating your wife. OK, sorry. I’m not saying people who mock the masked are statistically more likely to be wife beaters but I’m not not saying it either.
Perhaps most worrisome is the correlation that can’t be missed between anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.
“I will never take that vaccine when it comes out,” said someone I know IRL. “It’s just Vitamin D and I can get that for free walking outside.”
Yes, and –if this comment is any indication—straight into the path of an oncoming truck because, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, you’re stupid.
I know what you’re thinking: That was rude and further divides us when we should be pulling together in this crisis.
Yeah, well, she started it. By being stupid.
Look, if you don’t want to wear a mask, you may have to accept a life bereft of $4.99 rotisserie chickens for a while. I know it sucks but it’s not as awful as dying on the beach at Normandy or in Jim Bakker’s survival bunker sharing buckets of his end times “food.”
Celia Rivenbark trusts medical experts more than the guy who smoked on the school bus.