The mask mandate should be old news. So should hesitation to the vaccine. We’re in a pandemic, have been for more than a year, and yet Americans and locals both in Louisville and just across the bridge are behaving as if the request to protect public health by wearing a mask or taking the vaccine is something new, and, more than that, something that is such a great imposition. People, just calm the fuck down and put the shit on, and by the way, go get vaccinated.
Republican politicians are fighting at every corner to prevent mask mandates while governing or representing states with high transmission rates and hospitals full of COVID patients. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul suggested that Americans ignore the CDC. “It’s time for us to resist. They can’t arrest all of us,” he said in an unhinged rant about freedom and dumbassery while Kentucky turns blood red from all of the COVID being passed around in the community.
It isn’t just Republicans right now, honestly. Many vaxxed people are reluctant to return to masking and some are having their own set of infantile fits about having to be asked to wear the mask again. The vaccine is helping, but Delta has proven, in some breakthrough cases, that it can circumvent any of these vaccines and make you very sick.
In Louisville, schools have reinstated masking mandates requiring all staff and students to mask up regardless of their vaccination status. A similar ordinance was passed in Floyd County, Indiana but was held because of a few protesters. The commission of public health will revisit the ordinance Friday. Last night, Gov. Andy Beshear ordered a mask mandate for all Kentucky public schools. The outrage from state Republicans was something to behold. Attorney General Daniel Cameron has already hinted at challenging it.
It feels like we’re walking the same old road as we did last year.
We know masking works, but because of a few loud idiots, we have to politicize something that is an act of basic decency and preservation.
The way I look at the issue of masks and vaccines is this. Masks are the minimum I can do to prevent myself from getting sick, and it keeps my germs closer to me. I also don’t have to spend a lot of money on makeup or worry about men telling me to smile when I’d rather rely on my resting bitch face to illuminate how I feel. The mask is honestly quite a cozy way to scowl at fools like anti-vax/anti-mask protesters. I’ll keep it. Also, I like my son to be able to go to school, and the mask mandates makes that possible. But, I guess they forgot that whole protest last year. It makes no sense.
As far as the folks who are both anti-mask and anti-vax, I’m even more confused because so many of these people are literal cocktails of chemicals on legs. Many of us grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s when we chewed on lead paint, ate fruit covered in DDT and ate red dye 40 until we were rattling balls of nerves in meat cages who were given other chemicals to counteract all of those things. Some of us still use those chemicals now. We use chemicals to sleep, to wake up, to not be depressed or anxious or to deal with a plethora of other issues. The vaccine is truly one of the mildest things we’ve ever put in our bodies, so I just don’t get the resistance.
I guess the point I’m making is that all of the hubbub over masks and mandates, vaccines and vaccine passports is much ado about nothing. The resistance is because someone decided to make a political issue out of something that shouldn’t have any politics attached, but here we are. Damn it, here we still are.
