Mask avengers
Vigilantes enforcing Covid Correctness
Jeffrey Denny
Let’s say a guy wearing a Covid-protective mask holds up a string of essential liquor stores that sell certified N95 masks.
He’s not hoarding or trafficking in the masks. He gives them to front-line healthcare providers. Criminal, hero or both?
Does the internet love the “Mask Bandit”? Or hate him for hurting struggling small businesses? If caught, should “Covid Hood” go to jail? Or be set free like current inmates who did badder crimes?
As most of America rises up to defeat the Covid, an even more apocalyptic war of words has been raging on social media — from Facebook to your neighborhood listserv — about masking issues.
Who’s right or wrong? CDC.gov/coronavirus offers explicit, trustworthy, updated guidance. The Pandemic Puritans who enjoy schooling the Covid Incorrect take it from there:
Only certified N95 masks work!
They’re the only safe choice if we really care about elders, children, we the people, and flattening the curve.
N95s protect better than those cheap, ribbed blue masks made in bat-eating, Covid-releasing China the GOP is demonizing to reelect Trump.
The N95s are also more effective than the cool, creative, cute fabric masks hand-made by publicly spirited neighbors with sewing machines. And also those proffered by internet merchants leveraging a deadly global health crisis to make a buck and sell funny or scary masks.
For example, masks with “Don’t Tread on Me” images worn by prehistoric men we see at Flu Klux Klan rallies costumed and carrying military weapons like chicken hawk fake patriots, and lack both self knowledge and a sense of irony.
Don’t wear N95 masks!
Unless you’re also a stupid selfish ignorant bastard. Our struggling healthcare heroes desperately need them. Don’t you care about these brave women and men?!
I was out walking in my non-N95 mask and distantly passed another walker wearing a mask. I yelled a mask-muffled, “Bravo!” But then I saw he was wearing an N95 mask and muttered “Shame!” just to myself because he was walking with what appeared to be an angry Pit mix.
If you’re hoarding even a single N95 mask, then go to your local hospital and selflessly donate it. The look on their faces, if you confuse “thanks” with actual thanks, will make you feel like Saint Teresa of Calcutta had the right to but was too humble.
Homemade non-N95 masks help!
Fold the heirloom-quality dinner napkins you received as a wedding gift from horrible in-laws but never used with some CVS hair ties and voila! Works fine pending the imminent Trump Testing® and Trump Vaccine® coming to you, as Chrissie Hynde sang, maybe tomorrow, maybe someday.
Non-N95 masks will also protect you from people glaring or leaping away from you at Whole Foods while you’re standing in a Stalinist bread line to pay $6/lb. for organic purple asparagus because you need to eat healthy to strengthen your immune system and you’re so bored with the regular green asparagus. Boredom is stressful, which hurts your immune system.
Masks aren’t for protecting you!
They’re to protect other people to flatten the curve, save lives, socialize the wearing of masks and also signal your virtue.
In doing your part to end the pandemic quicker, you can prove that AR-15 toting anti-quarantine patriot freedom fighter pre-encephalitic “protesters” are actually stable geniuses who were right all along and we need to reopen America quicker so Trump can be reelected.
Masks aren’t necessary for jogging or biking!
Wrong, idiot! Scientific studies prove that even if you distance, your heavy breathing like Trump with a porn star spews your droplets that infectiously travel more than six feet.
Wrong, stupid-head! Those scientific studies have been debunked by the internet. Outside, your Covid droplets quickly drop to the ground and die screaming “death to tyrants!”
Wrong, pig-dog! Viruses don’t talk like that, internet studies show. Besides, what if a jogger or biker passes close by and sneezes or coughs his Covid droplets on you?
Wrong, you empty headed animal food trough wiper!! Other internet studies show the chances are slim to nil. And the jogger or biker probably just has allergies. It’s been a heavy pollen season.
Wrong, you son of a silly person! Stop citing convenient studies merely to rationalize putting your personal needs ahead of the public’s and spreading disease and death, you selfish bastard.
But it’s hard to jog or bike in a mask!
Wrong! If you really cared about other people, there are athletic filtration masks that allow for heavy breathing during exercise, you selfish bastard.
Wrong! These masks only filter what you’re breathing in, not what you’re breathing out, and you’re the selfish bastard.
But I need to jog or bike!
Leading jogging and biking clothiers and equipment makers and sellers say not exercising has deadlier public health risks than the Covid.
Wrong! My grandparents never jogged or biked, and they lived well into their 100s. They smoked cigars they rolled by hand, guzzled rotgut that wasn’t artisan small-batch craft distilled bourbon, and gobbled down non-locavore, non-grass fed, insensitively raised slaughterhouse sweepings since they were infants.
Yet somehow they survived the 1918 and many other pandemics, Chinese and otherwise, without “cycling” in their $2,500 Cannondale CAAD13 Ultegra racing bikes with the Ultralight SmartForm C1 Premium Alloy Frame w/full carbon fork and Fulcrum Racing 600 wheelset. Definitely not in gel-padded Lycra shorts that fit like sausage casings and accentuated their “personal belongings.”
Give me liberty or give me death!
Reopen America! Free the people! Workers of the World, unite! As the Marx-Engels “Communist Manifesto” demanded.
Wrong, you selfish bastard! We’re not even partly through the pandemic so we all need to do our part to lower the death toll and help our healthcare workers as celebrated by the patriotic Blue Angel flyovers.
Wrong! Less than 90,000 people have died so far, like in a normal flu.
Wrong! It’s 90,000 in a few months versus 60,000 normal flu deaths in a year, and the count is still rising.
Wrong! That’s just what the socialist Deep State big government overlords and their lying liberal media want you to think.
Wrong! What if your parents, grandparents, or family and friends died from the Covid?
Wrong! Nobody I know has it or died.
Wrong! Just wait. If you ignore Dr. Fauci, the Covid is coming to your town.
Wrong! So what? We’ll all get sick and then we’ll be inoculated.
Wrong! You pig dog trough-wiping son of a silly person selfish bastard!
Wrong! No, you are! [Incessant dry cough.]
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
