Let’s face it, scumbags are always going to be scumbags. But wearing a mask is a mark of common decency. Please do it
so. They enforced it themselves for the social good.
Secondly, masks. Japanese people began wearing face masks a century ago, during the 1919 flu pandemic, and they’ve never really stopped.
If you get the slightest cough or cold it is expected that you will wear a mask to protect those around you. It is enshrined in the culture. Because there is still the concept of doing things for the good of society. Here in the UK? Not so much.
In our house, we’ve been wearing masks whenever we go to the shops for a couple of months now, and it still shocks me to see the number of people without one in a supermarket.
Then, on Friday, Nicola Sturgeon made the long-overdue but eminently sensible announcement that wearing masks would now be mandatory in Scottish shops. And I made the mistake of reading the comments beneath her tweet…
I don’t know why I do this, I really don’t. There are three public figures whose tweets you should never read the comments on, who are guaranteed to bring out the very worst people in the UK: Gary Lineker, Sadiq Khan and Nicola Sturgeon. Here they were, the worst people in the country, the anti-maskers, saying stuff like: “Under whose authority are you making people do this?” And “this isn’t about health, it’s about control”. And “you just want to make money off the tax”. And “we’ve dived deeper into a communist state where face masks are mandatory”.
And “I look forward to seeing Sturgeon wearing a mask indoors but that will not be enough, I want to see her wear a muzzle”. And “gonna wear your masks with pride, you wee Nazis?”
This much was predictable: as they say, scumbags are always gonna scumbag.
But I do wonder, will Scotland soon be as bad as the US? (Mortality rate 38.6 deaths per 100k and rising fast). A place where there is little concept of society, where, in many parts of the country, the mask has become an object of hatred and scorn. Where you have videos going viral on the internet every week of some lunatic going absolutely crackers in a supermarket because they’ve been asked to wear one.
Because, of course, true, rugged American individualists do not wear masks. They’re for the soy-boymetropolitan-liberal- elite. Probably a conspiracy too, funded by Gates and Soros.
Let’s not do that. Let’s not be like America. Let’s be more like Japan, where courtesy does not have to be government-enforced. Where the idea of society is not dead. Where the mortality rate from coronavirus is over 60 times lower than it is here. Let’s be those guys.
You don’t have to wear your mask with pride. Wear it like a Tokyo c ommu t e r does, as a mark of common decency. Wear it however you like – just wear it.