I am sure you are clean and healthy and all that, but someone out there is sick. You might believe yourself to be strong-like-bull, too smart, or immune. Or you're ancient and think it's your time when it's your time. Please, feel free to play roulette with your 2nd Amendment souvenir, away from the rest of us. You are not too smart, healthy, or clean to catch a virus. You might well survive it, or you might never even know you had it because you're such a freakin Adonis. While you are asymptomatic, possibly for weeks, you could infect dozens of people because of your odd belief that viruses respect your freedom and patriotism and religion.
Soldiers give up many of their freedoms in order to serve our country, and you like soldiers. The best leaders also submit themselves to others. What did Jesus do, again? Good people give of themselves to protect others. You have the freedom to post idiotic rants on Twitter and drive around with a flag of a college/breakaway country you never attended/fought for, mainly because your stupidity in those cases cannot kill someone else. If you are a carrier of covid, and you infect three people who infect three people and so on, until it ends up in a retirement facility, then you just killed 20 senior citizens because you wanted to cry about wearing a face covering, which makes you a total snowflake.
It's not hard to do. Asians can do it, so we can, too. But we can do it better, like all the other stuff we do better than others. Even in Florida, most people actually wear shirts and shoes into stores. Remember when every store had a sign for that? People kind of know it's expected now that you cover your plantar warts and your back tattoos while shopping. And covid is much more serious than people getting grossed out by your yellow toenails.
I once read an article about why men in one African nation with a huge AIDS outbreak refused to wear condoms. A man being interviewed said it's like eating candy with the wrapper still on. I thought he was so ridiculously stupid, refusing to wear a simple (freely-distributed) item that could save his life. Stupid and selfish. Even the dumbest antimaskers would agree that a man in Zimbabwe in the 90s and admittedly sleeping with hookers should have been wrapped up or even double-bagged. So wrap yourself up.
At my kids' school, like in many places here, wearing a mask was deemed optional. For most kids, that meant no mask, ever. My kids tried to wear their masks, but they also felt they had to explain why, probably because other kids asked them why. The school had a few kids in masks because they had babies or old folks or compromised immune relatives at home. But I let my kids off the hook, telling them that if no one else was going to wear a mask, it really wasn't a big deal. Masks work when everyone wears them, limiting breathing projection to a couple of inches rather than 6-8 feet. We can handle being two inches apart from most people. Even my close-talking uncle stays roughly 6 inches from my face.
But here's the deal, and this is really THE deal. Even if you don't believe. Even if you don't have that baby or sick relative. Even if you think God will protect you from anything. IT'S ALL ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, NOT YOU! So the fact that my kids said they were wearing masks because of a father with a compromised immune system should have led every single jelly-faced kid at that school to put on a mask. Or the fact that one kid has a baby brother. Or a grandparent. If one kid is concerned, then all kids should have the compassion to just wear a freakin mask. I've seen entire schools jump rope for heart conditions or dye their hair pink, and if you want to think of it as charity to those who aren't as fortunate, then go right ahead. Love your neighbor as yourself, especially during a pandemic.
Maybe the numbers are off a bit, and maybe 100% mask usage wouldn't really eradicate the coronavirus. This article is even being finished as the numbers keep dropping in Florida, so I'll look like the extremist, especially since I don't even have a relative in a retirement home in Florida. Forgive me if I think the government has only a few basic functions, one of them being to protect its people. If the government disbanded all the military, police, and fire forces, you'd be worried. If it told us to do whatever you want during a hurricane or didn't post any speed limits, that would be irresponsible. But it's OK for our government to avoid mask mandates (the ONLY tool it really has) during an honest-to-goodness epidemic? That's not the American way of fixing problems. At least it wasn't back in 1918, when it was seen as UNpatriotic to avoid wearing masks.
I am sure that America is probably eventually heading towards herd immunity, and that's maybe what a lot of government officials and millennials want us to be. If you want to sacrifice a few hundred thousand old folks to become the first country to reach herd immunity, I guess that's where we're headed. My thought (and I'm just spitballin here) is that we mask up until there's a viable vaccine, and then allow the vaccine to create the herd immunity we all crave, as long as the antimasker/antivaxer crowd participates in allowing the government to inject them with a vaccine/tracking device.
If you want to be selfless and Christ-like, please consider wearing a mask whenever you are near other people.