A Letter to My Mask-Free Friends

 

Greetings, fellow sufferers from the indignities inflicted by the pandemic!

With great compassion and sympathy I write to bolster your spirits during this oppressive time. When I first thought of writing words of encouragement, I contemplated how to address you. An initial idea, “anti-maskers” I quickly eliminated because of it’s negative and possibly judgemental connotation. After all, you are not against masks as much as you are for free and open faces which smile and laugh and blow kisses and sing. 

So I begin this letter to assure you of my heart for you. I care deeply about you. I respect your rights: your God-given rights, your constitutional rights, and your rights as human beings on planet earth. What’s more, I sympathise with the discomfort, inconvenience, bother, mess, insanity, and general outrage which masks inflict on our lives and lifestyles. I see your side. I hear your protest. 

That said, I continue in the spirit of open conversation. Conversation has the potential of being monologue or dialogue. We have all been subjected to the dreaded one-sided conversation. Dialogue has the advantage of being more mutual, more friendly, more inclusive. So I offer you the other side of the conversation hoping that perhaps you may hear it with compassion.

There are fearful people out there. People who are afraid of getting covid themselves, yes. But far more are afraid that the people they love—really old and really young ones—will get a disease that kills them or has lasting serious effects. Such people are operating in fear mode. You have been afraid and you are well aware of what fear feels like. You cannot rationalise it; you cannot tell it that it is unfounded. 

You can respect it or scorn it, but you cannot argue with it.

There are also people out there who are not afraid but are aware of the impact they have on the society around them. They may not be worried about getting covid—they’re young, healthy, fit, or they eat right and take care of themselves. But they know that if they walk in crowded places without wearing a mask or get too near others wearing masks, they may feel like a threat. Or they may be perceived as being disrespectful or indifferent to the welfare of others. So, despite the inconvenience of “one more thing”, the bother of remembering to bring it, the unwelcome smell, the discomfort of wearing it, the hassle of making sure it doesn’t leak, and for some the damage it causes to the skin on their faces—they wear them. For the others. Not for themselves.

Our country makes up of 4% of the world’s population. Even as an affluent country with medical advantages, we could reasonably accept 4% of the deaths from Covid-19. But, perhaps due to our amazing testing (wink, wink), we account for 22% of worldwide Covid deaths. Statistics are just numbers and I agree that you can make them say just about what you like—but that looks plain weird to me. Little countries that don’t have our super-power and advanced technology have limited their death toll by things as low-tech as mask wearing and hand sanitising and social distancing. 

Seems to me that wearing a mask is a ridiculously small price to pay for a lower death rate. Let me wrap up with a quick observation: there are some folks who think that covid is simply not that big a deal. They point to other worldwide pandemics and marvel that we are making such a fuss about the flu. This might be the case: hindsight will tell us. However, this kind of hand-waving debunking sounds quite similar to the attitudes that claim that the climate is not changing and racism is not a thing in America. Never would I lump you in the same category as folks with those attitudes. But it would be well to acknowledge that dismissing something which does not affect you doesn’t really make it go away. It simply makes you less relevant in the conversation.

So please, engage in the conversation. Listen to the other side. And contemplate what it would feel like to be on the life-losing side.