If you could do one thing — an inconvenience to yourself — that could save someone else’s life, would you do it?
I see questions like this on social media all the time. Nary a thought goes into it before someone readily agrees.
Yet when faced with that situation in real life, the outcry is swift — it’s a personal affront, an attack on one’s liberty, a government mandate on one’s body.
No, it isn’t.
I am referring to the “universal face masking order” in place in Pennsylvania. It has the same effect as a law, although those “scholars” on social media don’t agree.
No one likes it. But it is looking like we’re stuck with it until the threat from this awful virus is gone. While most have decided to make the best of it, there’s a vocal minority who have chosen to raise a fuss about it, screaming at store personnel, being rude and refusing to comply.
Non-compliance doesn’t make one a hero. In fact, I’ve heard people walking away from the mask-protesters muttering “maybe they will believe it helps if they get sick.”
I’ve known a few people who have had COVID-19. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Recently, I was in a public place with family and overheard — not that we had a choice — an older man loudly excoriating the “gov’ment” for “this mask nonsense.” He’d been kicked out of one store already, and was telling anyone within listening radius that “they ain’t gonna make me wear no mask.” (There was a lot more profanity involved, but this is a family paper.)
“This COVID stuff is all made up anyway,” he announced. Moments later, his story seemed to change, as governors Tom Wolf and Andrew Cuomo had conspired to endanger all the “old people by forcing them into nursing homes to get sick with COVID.”
Confused? I know I was. I was tempted to stand up and yell, “That’s not how any of this works!” but I refrained.
Others are working on whatever ways they can to pull-one-over on someone — exactly who that is, I am foggy on — by faking a disability. Classy. “Well, stores can’t make you show proof of a disability, so what can they really do if you say you have one?”
As a person with a disability, who would be exempt from wearing a mask but chooses to do so because it’s the right thing to do, I can tell you what I would say: Shame on you.
I watched dozens of press conferences where Gov. Wolf said he would trust that Pennsylvanians would wear masks, “because it’s the right thing to do.” Was his trust misplaced? It appears so.
I’ve heard so many people vilify Wolf for his cautious approach to dealing with the virus, and his unyielding insistence on mask-wearing. What it brings to my mind is an elementary school principal putting covers over electrical outlets so kids don’t stick paper clips or forks into them.
The goal here is the same: Keep people safe, whether they want to be or not.
With every complaint I hear or see about having to wear masks, I want to tell people the same thing: Go to a children’s hospital and tell the kids there why it isn’t fair that you have to wear a mask. Tell the 4-year-old heart patient, days out of heart surgery, who gets to go outside for the first time while covered up against germs that could kill her, that it isn’t fair that you have to cover your nose and mouth.
Tell the immunocompromised child waiting on an organ transplant that your liberty is infringed, and you have every right to spread your germs to him.
And I know what I would hear in return. “That’s not the same. I have no intention of going to a hospital.”
Does that mean those children have no right to go into public, too? Should they spend their lives in isolation so other people don’t have to be responsible?
We wear shirts, pants and shoes in public. We wear seatbelts in cars. Most of us grow out of the urge to stick metallic things into electrical outlets.
Maybe we can hope that most of us can grow into the responsibility of wearing a mask.
(Marcie Schellhammer is the Era’s assistant managing editor. She can be reached at marcie@bradfordera.com.)
