For you, tough guy, wearing a mask is too much to ask
The high in Houston Monday during the weather- delayed final round of the United States Open was 49 degrees. The young Korean golfer A Lim Kim wore a heavy down parka as she walked the fairways in between shots, doffing it whenever she addressed the ball.
But during the entire round, the one thing she never took off was her coronavirus mask. Not once. And Kim, formerly ranked about 60th in the world, won the U. S. Open that cold, dark day, one of the premier athletic events of any year, on the strength of a focused three- hole birdie binge from No. 15 through No. 18, going from even par to finish with a three- under 68 to take our national championship against the world’s best golfers.
And she never took off her mask.
She didn’t even do that pressconference thing where athletes think they need to de- mask to be heard at the microphone. She just wore her mask, and we could hear her fine. She wasn’t proud, or doing what tiny minds like to call virtue- signaling: “I am not afraid of getting sick for me,” she said. She’s 25 years old, after all. “But I really don’t want to be a person who spreads disease and creates harm for someone or for the community. I am willing to take the inconvenience of wearing a mask, even though wearing a mask interferes with playing golf.”
She’s a sporting champion, and she wears a mask, not because she’s self- righteous or politically correct but because it’s the right thing to do in a viral pandemic in which the disease spreads from people’s exhalations and masks stop the spread. It’s not politics. It’s protecting others from a deadly disease.
And yet you, you freedom- loving iconoclast, you handsome rover from town to town, find it beyond the pale to even don a mask in the grocery store, much less while winning the Open.
You can’t be bothered either on the restaurant patio, or coming past me on the running trail, and because this is all a conspiracy about a bug no worse than the flu, you’re going to take us down with you into some imaginary natural herd immunity that doesn’t need a vaccine, or you’re going to die trying.
And speaking of vaccines, even though they are here, you’re not so sure you want to put up with that reported sore upper arm the medicos are warning about.
You weren’t so high on vaccines in the first place, and this has all the earmarks of a rushed guv’mint job.
No, for you, Mr. Happy Go Lucky, the real news is that our restaurateur governor went to a fancy Napa restaurant six weeks ago in a room that looked at best mock- outdoors and no one at the dinner wore a mask as they noshed. Imagine if Hunter Biden were there! Now that’s what you would call news.
Not the fact that there are now more than a thousand people in Los Angeles County ICUs with COVID- 19, more than four times the number of patients who were there before Thanksgiving. Or
that 600 novel coronavirus patients a day are being newly admitted to
L. A. County hospitals.
And it’s happening all over the state, as it is all over the country. One day last week there were more than 50,000 new coronavirus cases reported in California, and there were nearly 400 COVID- 19 deaths in the state another day. The 51,724 cases was a record, breaking the previous record of a week before of just over 42,000.
But you, you mercurial patriot, the suits in Sacramento don’t get to force a mask around your mug. The important thing is that you have a constitutional right to go to the bar and the gym, isn’t it. That’s your own daily U. S.
Open championship.
And since that Thanksgiving bash with the big family, you’re already a little short of breath these dark, lockdown days. A mask would be too much to ask.