I can’t keep track of mask mandates and forgot there was a new one in place when I went to the store at the gas station. The cashier took out a single-use mask and gave it to me. I immediately put it on and apologized. Didn’t protest, didn’t make trouble. I understand, it’s not his fault, and I’m not going to be a jerk to a gas station worker. It should have ended there. But the cashier – a fit youngish guy – went off his rocker and started screaming, “Thirty thousand cases a week! People are dying! How hard is it to mask up to save lives?” I heard him ranting in an empty store after the door closed behind me.
3 responses to “Sickness”
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A random retail employee helping me this week breathlessly mentioned her regional manager’s kid dying of cancer, and segued seamlessly into something about babies dying in the current wave of COVID. Same credulity to both.
This morning at church, I had to take the toddler out to the car to change his pants. On the way out, I passed a lovely family, young kids, nobody wearing a mask: dad was pleading with someone from the church in the narthex, begging to be allowed to go in without masks: “We’ve been here before, I emailed the priest!” When I returned from the car, I saw the family getting back into their van and leaving. They’d driven over an hour to come to liturgy there. Getting back into church, the lady who’d tossed them out was reassuring/congratulating herself about it, to someone else: “… I feel good about that…” I’m not sure how. I felt awful.
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My uncle assaulted my father because he didn’t wear a mask near their father, who is elderly. He bullied my dad into wearing a mask around their dad because he was high on hysteria. I still don’t understand why people don’t look at the box the single use masks are in that say, “These masks do not prevent transmission of illness” and also consider the highly contagious virus that ‘escaped the lab’ as somehow being relevant to each other.
The lady who tossed out the maskless family needs to read her bible. As someone who has been chased out of church for not wearing a mask, I find her utterly useless as a Christian.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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