My mother says she has “lockdown lunacy.” I can understand. It’s been more than four months since I stressed to her that she needed to take this seriously and go under self-imposed quarantine. She’s a nurse, so it didn’t take too much convincing, but she was getting a lot of “conflicting” information in the US.
Nonetheless, she has been very serious about it and has kept her distance from just about everyone she knows. She lives in an “over-55” community in Florida where everyone knows everyone else’s business. So of course, when she started taking this so seriously in March, many of her neighbors who chose to listen to the US government, considered her to be “the crazy lady over on Cortina Lane.”
Well, they don’t think that anymore. They still think the US President and government have done all they could to stop the virus, and that this will all “just magically disappear.” But they are scared. They now know people who have died from the virus. They know they are the demographic that likely won’t survive a case of COVID-19.
But, many of those same people still think nothing of going out to restaurants with friends and not wearing masks. Or, of going to someone’s house for drinks or to play a card game, and not wearing masks. And some of them even participated in a protest this week against wearing masks because they said their, “Constitutional rights are being violated by being forced to wear a mask.” They actually blocked a highway over this.
Okay, first of all, I cannot find the word mask in the Constitution. Second, really? This is what you want to protest about? That someone who knows better than you about health and viruses has said that this is the best way to contain the spread of the virus?
How can people be so stupid? To sit back and watch the entire US sink back into a massive spread of this virus again, to watch the best hospitals in the country being overwhelmed with so many cases they are keeping COVID patients in the emergency room, sometimes for days at a time, and then to argue about wearing a mask, is well, simply stupid.
Well, I’ll answer my own question. They are arguing about wearing a mask because it all stated at the top. When the President of the US refused to wear a mask, then made snide comments to people who did, when he made the entire thing a political issue, they felt they didn’t need to wear one. They began to think they would be foolish to wear a mask.
Some of them even locked on to stupid conspiracy shit online that said that wearing a mask could kill them from inhaling their own CO2. Hmm…I wonder why I never saw all those doctors and nurses dropping dead in the hospital I worked in. I guess they have magic masks that don’t work the way all of our masks do.
Making this a political thing was maybe the most reprehensible thing that the President of the US could do. Any normal person would have stressed that everyone should wear a mask. When all the health experts in the world agree on one thing, why would someone not think that it might actually be true?
Why? Because the President of the US can’t help but make everything about him. He didn’t like the way he looked in a mask, so to cover up for his insecurities, he made it a political thing.
But now, now that he thinks he may be heading toward a loss in November, he decided to wear a mask to go visit wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital.
Okay, let’s see if this is clear to everyone who loves the guy, here’s why that happened: he was worried about the polls, so to calm him down his staff said, “we just need to show you wearing a mask somewhere.”
He argued about it because he couldn’t go back on all of his stupid comments about it, so they said, “what if you go to a place where you HAVE to wear a mask?”
Then someone turned on the light bulb. “I’ve got it, a visit to Walter Reed. You’ll be Patriotic visiting the wounded soldiers. And you’ll be showing that wearing a mask is okay in important situations. It’s not really going back on everything [stupid] you’ve said. It’s like saying it’s important when you think it’s important.”
Then the President pondered and said, “can it be black? Then I could say something about Black Lives are important when I think they are.”
Pompeo and Meadows looked at each other stunned for a moment, then Kushner said, “Let’s just leave it at the mask for now. Maybe next week we can get you to say something negative about David Duke again.”
Can’t wait.
Unless you’re able to confirm the statements by the White House staff you cite in your opinion piece, it’s preferred you don’t spread fake news.