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What Happened To My Mask Mandate?
God has taken your mask mandate to live with Him in heaven: it’s a very special place where wars and diseases and billionaires don’t exist, only contentment. I’m sure you’ve experienced some wondrous places – on vacation in Costa Rica, watching Netflix or listening to NPR – but heaven is a gazillion times more joyous than even downtown Portland or Minneapolis. John Lewis and Woodrow Wilson live in heaven and so do Maya Angelou and George Floyd. Your mask mandate will be safe and happy in heaven forever, and God will always take care of it.
You can still wear a mask – you will always be able to wear a mask – but you can’t force anyone else to wear one, not ever. That probably sounds pretty harsh. One day you’re relishing the satisfaction that comes from imposing your militant risk aversion on people who don’t share your assessment and the next day you wake up to find freedom of choice is the order of the day. Maybe you got a bad feeling in your stomach or a feeling of emptiness or maybe you have those feelings still. You loved your mask mandate very, very much and you did not want God to take it away.
Your feelings are perfectly normal and natural – they are the way God made you – but God took your mask mandate in accordance with His wonderful plan, which is beyond our understanding. You must trust and have faith that He loves your mask mandate just as He loves you or Medicare For All. Someday, a very, very long time from now, after you have lived a very long and happy life with the Green New Deal, God will take you to live with Him in heaven, too. Then you will understand.
Even though your mask mandate is gone forever, it can still be a part of your life. So long as love and compassion and an ingrained sense of moral superiority dwell in your heart, your mask mandate can dwell there, too. At night, before you go to sleep, you can talk to your mask mandate in a prayer. You can think about the exhilaration of lording it over others that the mask mandate gave you, or all the smiling children’s faces you didn’t have had to look at. Someday, when you’re not as sad as you are today, you may even find that thinking about your mask mandate can give you some of the same sense of perfect virtue that the mask mandate used to give you.
These feelings belong to you and they always will – no one can take them away from you. Even when you are very old, you will still be able to think about your mask mandate and remember how much you loved it. But you will still not be able to make others wear a mask against their will – or even get them fired if they don’t get vaccinated.
Published in Humor
And when They want to reminisce about Their mask mandate They can always watch youtube videos of terrorists getting arrested for not complying.
There was a restaurant owner in Texas last year who expressed this sentiment. She was so upset when the governor stopped the indoor mask mandate. She was going to continue it, to protect her customers, but now she couldn’t point to the state as the bad guy. It was going to be on her.
Did she go out of business? One can hope.
I think the sentiment you describe is a little different: the restaurant owner doesn’t cherish the mandate but merely wishes she could blame the government for imposing it. The sentiment I’m reaching for in the post above is that of those for whom it’s not enough wear a mask but others must be made to wear one, too.
Your piece has almost inspired me to look for the one bedraggled mask that is here somewhere in the household.
I know the thing is here somewhere: in the bag holding rags or cleaning supplies, or perhaps tucked under the doggy blankets in one of the doggy beds.
I should really try and wear a mask before it goes off to join its sibling masks up in heaven.
You can come visit me in New Mexico. I think we’re going to be the last state in the nation.
Our daughter, son-in-law, and small child grandchildren live in New Mexico. We haven’t been there for a few months, but we have always marveled at the amount of mask wearing we saw. Even as recently as last November we saw people walking outdoors by themselves wearing masks. It pains me to see photos of New Mexico kids wearing masks. Last summer, our grandson was required to wear a mask outdoors at T-Ball and soccer. But at least they’re not wearing them outdoors at their preschool / daycare, and I think the preschool gave up trying to get the kids to wear them indoors. It really pains me to look at their local newspaper (online) and see the high school basketball players wearing masks while playing in the games!?.
It bothers me that someone wouldn’t quit the team over that.
It was obvious by August 2020 that they didn’t do anything at the aggregate level.
On the micro level, the longer you spend around somebody, the less it matters.
What would happen if they just said that?
I still say that private businesses should be allowed to refuse service to unmasked and/or unvaccinated folk, but I think private businesses should be allowed to refuse service to darn near anybody.
An informal survey at my place of employment suggests that those who still wear masks (it is officially still required) consider the majority who do not wear masks, except when senior management is within sight, as a threat to the health of the community and should be held responsible for the expected mass deaths. The non-maskers view the mask-wearers as silly idiots.
I marvel too at the amount of people still going along. I’m one of not many maskless in stores. Twitter’s not real life but look at a lot of the replies on that tweet. So many expressing thanks. Fortunately we don’t have to wear masks at our church.
You can still wear a mask – you will always be able to wear a mask
Wasn’t it illegal before the virus to wear a mask in public? I’m pretty sure it was in most places. I wonder how long it will take for that to go back into effect. That will be fun to watch…people being stopped by cops for wearing an N95.
The banks have icons that indicate no hoodies, no sunglasses, no masks, and no exposed guns. Now they also post signs saying No Mask No Entry.
That some people hold wildly exaggerated estimates of the mortality of the Covid virus has driven much of the mandates and other responses to the virus. That was a big driver in the school debate – teachers’ unions asserting that getting Covid was a guaranteed death sentence. That I still run into people who even today believe that Covid is an almost always fatal disease astonishes me. But they’re out there. And they’re noisy and pushy.
The governor of New Mexico is a loon on the order of Whitmer and Hochul. It’s just that NM has so few people that it does not make the headlines.
It’s our goal when we travel from Texas to Arizona or Colorado to time things so that we don’t have to stop for gas, food or bathroom in New Mexico. So over the last two years (one fast food stop excepted) we have spent approximately zero dollars in NM.
Normally, we stop in Santa Fe on every trip. Not now.
We plan to be in NM for a few days next month to visit family. They have experienced no problems that I’ve heard of, and I don’t think they’re all masked or vaxed, unless they changed their mind since I last saw them. If they were to ask me I’d recommended the vaccine, but they haven’t. There have been a couple of cases of covid among them.
Here is a little activity I posted on Facebook tonight after I got home from my substitute teaching job today. During lunch, I’d checked my school emails and found that the governor of Nevada had done away with the mask mandate in our state, so the district put out a message that, at the end of school today, no more masks were required! Yippee!! I’m SOOOOO sick of wearing one. Especially in elementary school. You cannot understand the little people’s words. They do not know what you’re saying. I mean, teaching phonics without being able to see someone’s lips moving?? So, as a retired teacher, now when I go to my subbing jobs (a little money and the fun of teaching without the paperwork!) I will enjoy myself even more! (And I’m sorry for you New Mexico residents…I hope your governor catches up with the rest of us, soon.)
That’s true. Even her sexual harassment case was overshadowed by Cuomo’s. She can’t get the same national attention.
That’s pretty impressive considering how big we are. That’s a lot of ground to cover.
From El Paso to Arizona is do-able on I-10 with a full tank and empty bladder. And when we head for Colorado, we can just clip the corner of NM from the panhandle of TX via Raton. Santa Fe was a (welcome) detour that we always took when heading northwest.
When the left lifts the mask mandates and say they’re “following the science,” what they mean is political science. Heck, there are even news articles that directly make this assertion . . .
As far as I’ve ever found, you can’t post video directly to Ricochet. You have to put it on youtube or something, and then post the link, which – at least for youtube – should “embed.”