Mask rage: Should we be forced to wear a mask to protect ourselves? Don’t fight it, wear it
Bee photographs published over the Memorial Day weekend showed water enthusiasts crowding a Rancho Cordova park on the American River and my first thought was: I wonder how many will find out in two to three weeks they have contracted COVID-19?
There they were: Not social distancing. Not wearing masks.
We’re in the midst of reopening our shuttered society with the COVID-19 menace still present and many of us act as if the menace is somehow gone. Are we nuts? Honestly, do we really think this is over?
Respected health officials are sounding the alarm that we are moving too fast to get back to “normal.” But our “normal” meant we could be close to each other, talk with each other, cough or sneeze without imperiling each other. That normal doesn’t exist.
That’s how this thing is passed. Lassen County opened up and guess what happened? It didn’t have any COVID-19 patients and now it does. Sonoma County began opening up and guess what? COVID-19 cases began to spike. Now the county is pumping the breaks on re-opening.
Nationally, we just passed 100,000 people dead from the coronavirus. How can we go back to “normal” and yet reject wearings masks to slow the spread of a virus that has not gone away? We can’t.
What are we doing? Do we really want to pretend that we’ve had enough and, therefore, we’re just going to go out there and take our chances? We’re really going to pretend that 100,000 people haven’t died? Or that the first counties to begin re-opening are already sounding the alarm?
Try this on: Open up, cover up
I have faith in Sacramento. When there is a need in the community, people answer. People care. People have stepped up, from readers responding to to help its hometown newspaper. To a long list of leaders who have shaped Sacramento. To our believers in public education, the ultimate equalizer in the fight against poverty.
Too many of us have not gotten the message yet: Wear a face mask when you are outside.
No, the Sacramento County Public Health office does not mandate that we wear face masks the way Santa Clara County and others do. In an interview with me on Wednesday night, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg raised the possibility of crafting a city ordinance that was more explicit than the county ordinance.
Is the county right? Is the city right? Who cares? If we’re going to return to restaurants, hair salons, if we go back to church, if we have people over for dinner, we must act as if we know the danger is still out there. We have to act as if we care about infecting someone else.
And if you refuse to wear a mask – if you consider this whole pandemic overblown – then you are not only inviting its spread, your are inviting an ultimate return to sheltering in place. Or stricter measures to enforce masks and other precautions.
In Europe, police and soldiers enforce COVID-19 restrictions. Law enforcement leaders don’t really want to do that in California and that’s not a bad thing.
Respect the ask for a mask
The last thing we need is a video of an African American man getting beaten down by a cop enforcing COVID-19 policies. It’s happened in other communities. Can our community guarantee that everyone can wear a mask around town? Wearing a mask in Sacramento needs to become normal even as we understand, for example, that some African American men have serious reservations about wearing them in public.
Steinberg isn’t wrong for pondering tightening the language to encourage people to wear masks. And he’s also aware of the pitfalls. So here lies the challenge of our lifetimes so far:
How do we rescue our crushed economy, our schools, our unemployed, depressed, stir crazy neighbors who ache to venture out of their homes – to make money, to feel whole?
We wear masks. We need a community-wide campaign that demonstrates why this is important. We need to educate people to please, please, please do not vent your months-old, pent-up frustrations at your restaurant server or your grocery store clerk asking you to wear a mask.
We rescue our region and keep the plague from flooding our hospitals by viewing the mask as more than an inconvenience. We view it as an expression of our love of community that we’ve expressed in so many other ways for so many years.
If things go bad, the county could toughen up its language – that’s possible. If things go bad, we could stop being a model county that contained the coronavirus and join the list of those counties that opened too soon.
Wearing a mask shouldn’t be political. If we’re going to open up, wearing a mask is the only way to do it.
So let’s do it. Together.
