Wearing a Mask in Public Doesn’t Make You a Coward, It Makes You Safer

Why is this even a thing?

Why does everything have to be yet another salvo in the endless war to “own the libs”? What even is “owning the libs”? Don’t y’all muhfuckas have lives? I know stay-at-home orders are still in place, but can’t you mow the grass or spend time with your families or…I don’t fuckin’ know, play some Animal Crossing: New Horizons and blow off some steam? Because threatening people with violence and breaking people’s arms over not wearing masks is some next level craziness that could easily be avoided if y’all weren’t so damn insecure. (And you know how “y’all” is.)

This is why “the libs” are always saying y’all couldn’t handle actual, real oppression. Here’s a list of mundane shit y’all can do that I probably can’t without the very real threat of getting harassed, arrested, shot, killed, or some combination of all four. And y’all can’t handle being asked, politely, to put on a fucking mask to help prevent the spread of a virus that’s on it’s way to killing 100,000 people? And somehow that makes us the cowards?

And that’s not 100,000 liberals, fam. That’s 100,000 of y’alls peoples, too. We’re in this shit together.

Unlike systemic racism in America, the coronavirus (mostly) doesn’t discriminate. You may have heard that black people are catching it and dying from it more than y’all, but that’s only because that same systemic racism has forced black people to live unhealthier lifestyles, largely absent of the access to health care, insurance, medication and healthy food you guys have access too. It doesn’t mean that you can’t die from catching it; it means that the collective failure of y’all to make sure everyone has equal ability to live healthier lifestyles means that from everyone one of y’all that dies, four black people might die. Maybe that’s an acceptable risk to y’all, but the end result is still y’all dying too.

The coronavirus doesn’t give a shit if you’re not afraid of it, my dude. You can not prove your masculinity by “standing up to it”. The coronavirus is not the high school bully that just needs for y’all to beat it up. If “being a man” is what this is really all about, what type of man puts his family at risk to appease politicians who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire? What type of man shuns facts to protect their fragile feelings? There’s nothing manly about not wearing masks. It’s just fucking dumb, fam.

Speaking as an essential worker who has had to go to work and wear a mask and deal with fogged up glasses every day, let me inform you that I do not feel like a “warrior”. I do not feel particularly brave. I am compelled to work because I work in an industry that has been deemed “essential”, a business that has to make money and will not close to protect my life. Every day I worry that I will forget to use hand sanitizer, or forget to wash my hands, or that I am doing something wrong. I worry that I will take this disease home, infecting my entire family. Even if by y’alls definition I’m a “warrior”, my family are not. They’re civilians. And they could be causalities in a war that could be effectively neutered if y’all just stayed the fuck home, and actually demanded that y’alls government did their fuckin’ jobs and protected us during hard times.

And I know there’s nothing the politicians y’all vote for love to tell y’all more than how much government doesn’t work, and how everything would be better if the country was run like a business, and how the failures of the larger federal government to act in the defense of its people are because it can’t meet the challenges of the day, and it’s up to us as individuals to collectively pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, get back to work, and accept the massive loss of human lives as just the cost of being at “war” with an easily defeated enemy. It’s natural to want to assume some level of control over things that we cannot control, and Republicans and the President of people who eat mayonnaise and white bread sandwiches would love nothing more for y’all to be fighting in these streets and protesting wearing masks and having to stay home while they funnel money that should be contributing to your ability to feed your family to companies who, I can assure you, absolutely do not fucking need more money.

Why the constant pettiness? Why the need to be contrary to everything good and decent, literally all the time, while twisting yourself into knots trying to make moral arguments about how and why the things you believe are right, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that shows you’re wrong?

Just wear a mask. It’s not hard. It’s not a big ask. It takes little to no effort on your part. You want to know what would own the libs far more than being seen as unreasonable dickheads with little regard for themselves or others? Defying our expectations and actually being decent human beings contributing to the betterment of society. Nothing will make a liberal shut up faster than simply doing the right thing, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.

None of us want to keep beefin’ with y’all. Life is too short to spend most of it hating other people. Hating other people is fucking exhausting, fam. The sooner y’all realize that, the happier y’all and everyone else will be.