You can’t top the dude in Scottsdale AZ (city councilor and–this will shock you–middle aged white man) who put on a viral performance at an anti-masking rally. Google it. Not sure which church he goes to.
The city enforced the wearing of masks during the 1918 pandemic, but some residents were dismissive, wearing them improperly out of apathy or to smoke, leading to hundreds of arrests and even a shooting. And some heartily fought back against the enforcement, believing that the masks were unsanitary, useless, and a threat to their constitutional rights.
That was incredibly stupid of him. Makes you wonder about elected officials, but as Mark Twain reported said about fools, better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
On a physician site, someone reported that someone has printed up a fake ADA certificate saying that due to their disability they are exempt from wearing a mask.The satirical response was producing an identical fake certificate only replacing “mask” with “pants” claiming exemption from wearing pants, so maybe it is the same ones needing to “breathe.”
It seems to me that people just don’t have much regard for expertise anymore. Everyone is a stable genius with judgement so good that facts become optional. Scary times to be going through a pandemic.
As the well circulated (and rather sardonic) meme said:
The spread of coronavirus is directly proportional to two things:
How dense the population is
How dense the population is
And if you can’t tell the difference your part of the second one.
I love my evangelical brothers and sisters very much but if you throw your weight behind a sustained program of anti-intellectualism, humean skepticism, and conspiracy theorising that particularly seeks to vilify scientists, What’s going to happen? Eventually the bird will come home to roost. When it does one will have a large swath of the population who are not only predisposed to be hostile to the science and open to conspiracy but also lacking in the intellectual skillset to sort fact from fiction. Which appears to me to be, in part, what is taking place in Florida.
Tragic. My heart breaks for the US right now. Praying for you all.