The Young And The Mask-Less
Whether young or old, are you more likely to be a Trump supporter if you don't wear a mask during a coronavirus pandemic that has killed 100,000 people in the US?
Does your political affiliation dictate whether or not you make the simple sacrifice to wear a mask in the US whenever you are out and about?
Surely it goes deeper than politics. Or does it?
Is all this refusal to wear masks solely about selfishness? Laziness? Indifference?
Does going mask-less mean you are more likely to be a supporter of Donald Trump than of Joe Biden?
More likely to be a Republican than a Democrat?
Has mask versus mask-less in America become a form of political warfare or is it the new boxers versus briefs?
People have been killed in America while merely requesting personal responsibility from some individuals. Consider Calvin Munerlyn.
I thought that personal responsibility was the American staple of Republicans?
Well, that’s gone out the window. Long gone.
Now that 100,000 people (!) have died from COVID-19 in the United States, don’t people have an extra responsibility to not only slow the number of deaths but reduce the number of cases? Aside from those who work three jobs or are in the military (aka the vast majority of poor white or Black and Latinx people) in general Americans aren’t asked to sacrifice much of anything.
Arguably not since Vietnam with the draft.
Now in this 21st century automated, check-your-brain-at-the-door-and-we’ll-do-the-thinking-for-you nation, many of us dread the *thought* of waiting in a line for a cashier. We can’t wait to go to the next nowhere.
And this was before physical distancing.
Now, the frenzy of wanting to rush back to the middle of the nothing is congruent as much with a lack of leadership from the top as with a disregard for and disrespect of human life. Sociopathic theater.
While Donald Trump has repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic.
Not to be outdone, small, loud, virulent groups of racists and misogynists have invaded state capitols, most notably Lansing, Michigan, where armed white male Trump supporters with nooses, swastikas and Confederate Battle Flags were chanting racist things and making death threats to Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
When Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” last month he also meant liberate yourself from responsibility or consequences.
After all, drinking the Clorox is the new “drinking the Kool-Aid”.
Donald Trump is the new Jim Jones.
Whatever happened to the Golden Rule? When did it become the Me Rule? 1981? Photo: Omar Moore
Trump’s tiny-handed manhood is forever self-tested — he can’t even fire someone to their face. And he’s scared of wearing a mask in front of cameras in the same way he doesn’t like the rain falling on his head.
Donald Trump is no B.J. Thomas.
Definitely no Bacharach either.
Yet too many people follow Trump by taking his non-lead.
The one thing I haven’t talked about yet is race, and the overarching truth that Black people, Latinx and Native Americans are perishing from COVID-19 at alarmingly disproportionate rates to white people in the U.S. Especially in nursing homes. Is this why I routinely see a majority of white people without masks or gloves gleefully gallivanting the streets in packs of five, six and seven, not physical distancing, on the streets of San Francisco these days? These weeks? These months?
What will it take to change that mindset?
A new president of the USA? Empathy? Compassion? Love?
I often wonder if those white people in America who walk without masks (a large swath of the mostly under-fifties) do so thinking that “well, it’s Black people who get this virus and die from it the most so I’ve really got nothing worry about”? I wonder.
In America for some people exhibit a racist, arrogant, ageist, privileged, carefree, aggressively hostile backlash to respecting your fellow person. The free, white and 21 crowd don’t seem to have heard of the Golden Rule. (Nor have some of their parents or other elders.)
Last week in one part of San Francisco during a 15-minute down time spell on a decent weather day I counted just four people wearing masks out of eighty people. The overwhelming majority of the mask-less were white people (95 percent) of varying ages.
Is that a Trump thing? A selfish thing? A “white” thing? Or an irresponsible thing?
”We should all be wearing masks,” Michigan Governor Whitmer said. “We should all be getting tested.”
That’s leadership. And it should be followed.
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