To All the Business Owners Who Won’t Enforce the Mask Mandates
Tags: Masks, Vaccines, Business, Coronavirus, Health

To All the Business Owners Who Won’t Enforce the Mask Mandates

Photo by Atoms on Unsplash

Iran some errands with my brother and mother over the weekend. We decided to support a little mom and pop shop and ordered a few items that we would pick up through curbside delivery, since my mother, who is considered “vulnerable” in this pandemic, doesn’t like to go into stores in our alt-right, COVID-denying, anti-mask town.

We all put on our masks when we arrived — even me, in the back seat — just to be cautious. And thank god, because the attendant suddenly appeared, a white man in his thirties, without a mask on and asked us where we wanted our items. Backseat? Back of the car?

My brother leaned backwards, obviously put off by the man’s uncovered face and said, “In the back, please.”

The man literally leaned right into the open window and said, loudly, “I can’t hear you with your mask on.”

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My mother sat there, frozen, which is saying a lot — when someone deliberately does something antagonistic, she’s usually quite happy to push right back. But I think we were all stunned by this person’s blatant disregard of our state’s mask mandate and to our health, when our masks made it clear that we were trying to be cautious.

As he loaded the order into the car, we watched as several people went into and out of the store — not a single one of them wearing a mask.

We were silent for several minutes as we drove away when finally I said, “We never should have ordered from them. I don’t want to support businesses that deliberately ignore the mask mandate.”

“I didn’t know,” my mom said. “I had no idea anyone would be that blatantly defiant or disrespectful to their customers.”

“It didn’t look like any of them cared,” my brother piped in.

I had to remind my mother that she hasn’t really ventured out since the first lockdown in March, out of fear for her health, and that some businesses in town were defying the guidelines and refusing to enforce the mask mandate. Our town has witnessed several anti-mask rallies since March. People will routinely walk into the big grocery store chains, where mask-wearing is enforced at the door, with their masks on, and then pull their masks down below their chins for the duration of their visit.

“How is this even an issue?” she asked.

I don’t have an answer.

I’ve been curious enough to read about it in various news outlets from both sides of the political spectrum. All of them seem to report the same reasons behind people’s issues with mask mandates, but I’ll strategically quote from NPR, which is widely recognized as a center-leaning media outlet.

In one recent article about the pandemic, they quoted a Kansas veterinarian, who said,

“My fear doesn’t happen to be the COVID virus but the overreach of national and state officials who believe because of their positions or ego that their opinions are fact.”

Another, echoing the suspicion of governmental overreach, said, “What will they come after next, our guns, our children?”

Of course, I’m stunned by these perspectives. Did we not vote for our governors and mayors because we believed they were competent enough to make tough decisions in times of crisis? Do people really believe that medical advice from top experts in our country is the product of egotism?

And since when did taking care of one another and exercising precaution in a pandemic threaten our parental rights? (I’d address the 2nd amendment issue here, as well, but you know what? We are coming for those assault rifles and we were doing that long before anyone suggested wearing masks in a pandemic.)

Of course, none of this makes sense. It’s all political propaganda, designed to weaponize this pandemic for political gain.