Stop Caring if the Vaxxed Wear a Mask
For a country that supposedly loves individualism and freedom as much as we do, we spend a lot of time having opinions about what other people do.
Case in point: all the questions lately about why on earth vaccinated people would still wear masks in public outdoors.
I’m half-vaxxed myself. I realize I could probably stop wearing a mask outdoors and be just fine, but guess what? I’m still wearing one. I’m going to keep wearing a mask after I’m fully vaxxed, even outdoors. I’m going to keep wearing one until COVID isn’t spreading at high rates anymore.
Why does that reflect on anyone around me? Only because we can’t get our boundaries straight.
People wore masks before the pandemic. They wore them to avoid flus and colds. That’s a personal decision. If it makes you feel weird, that’s on you, not on the wearer.
When the pandemic hit these shores, we decided that our feelings about masks were more important than what the masks do. To many people, someone else wearing a mask wasn’t simply a neutral action. No, it was an assault on their liberty!
It’s like saying my washing my hands after using the bathroom is a statement by me that your hands are dirty. It’s one of a series of the dumb non sequiturs our country loves to indulge in in the name of liberty or freedom or whatever.
Now that vaccine hesitancy is spreading as fast as COVID, the argument goes like this: the reward for getting vaccinated is that you don’t have to wear a mask anymore. If people who are vaccinated wear them, they’re implying that the vaccine-hesitant don’t get their reward. This is the dumbest reverse logic ever. People wouldn’t wear masks, so COVID spread. Now they won’t get vaccines, so COVID keeps spreading. How is showing them relief from an action they never took going to convince them to make good choices now? It won’t. It’s like saying people with bulimia owe it to people with anorexia to gorge themselves publicly so the anorexic can see what they’re missing out on.
A mask protects the individual and helps the individual avoid spreading whatever they have to others. It’s an individual choice. It is helpful to you (and to all of us), but it isn’t about you, unless you make it about you.
So stop. Live up to our supposed ideals of freedom and personal liberty and just let the vaxxed wear their masks in peace. It’s the American dream.
