Wearing a facemask doesn’t make me a Democrat, and shouldn’t be political

Several people have asked for examples of criticism I’ve received for wearing a mask. Earlier this month at the Pulaski County Commission, the jail construction project manager, Marlon Peterson, decided to say my mask is a “Democratic muzzle of discipline” and that muzzles are used to control biting dogs. I told him I considered it a compliment that I’m a dog that bites. It’s a compliment comparable to what another city official in a different government entity did by calling me a “malevolent dwarf” in an open meeting of the city council. (That comment predated the COVID-19 outbreak and was regarding an entirely separate issue.)

Marlon Peterson knows I’m going to post this, and in fact, he asked me to do so.

Marlon also knows I’m a Republican, and a hard-core conservative. I add that for readers who don’t know me and might think I’m a Democrat. If he wants to argue that Democrats are trying to muzzle people with coronavirus regulations, he may have a point, but as far as I’m concerned, the virus knows no political party.

The Ozarks region of Southwest Missouri is very conservative, and Pulaski County is even more conservative, due in large part to Fort Leonard Wood’s role in bringing large numbers of military personnel to our county. Most of our elected officials are not just conservative but quite hard-right. That’s typical in both deep red and deep blue communities; the people who run for and get elected to office tend to be those who are not only politically active but aggressively committed to the dominant political views of their community.

However, when things get to the point that I walk into meetings of some of our local elected governing bodies and have people tease me that I must have become a Democrat because I’m wearing a face mask, things have gotten out of control.

Calling me a Democrat is just plain silly. Calling me a Democrat because I wear a facemask is beyond silly. I’m not going to tell other people to wear a facemask, but I’m not going to continue listening to people ridicule my choice to wear a mask without responding.

I don’t intend to repeat most of the comments I’ve received about wearing a facemask. They’ve come at several different local government entities.

I’m not telling other people they have to wear a mask, and given current conditions in Pulaski County, the only place where I think the medical evidence justifies a requirement to wear facemasks is U.S. Army Fort Leonard Wood. That’s already being required out on post for the people who are at high risk for contracting or spreading #COVID19 — and since most of our Pulaski County #Coronavirus cases are on Fort Leonard Wood or connected to Fort Leonard Wood, that requirement is a good thing.

I don’t intend to be the next Andrew Havranek KY3, the reporter up in the Lake of the Ozarks who contracted COVID-19 and had to go into a 14-day quarantine. If I were to contract COVID-19, because I come into regular contact with every city council and almost every school board and other government entity in our county, it’s quite likely the result would be a shutdown of numerous local government entities due to everybody with whom I had close contact being required to quarantine themselves.

I don’t need to justify my decision to wear a face mask to anyone. The fact that I have a 90-year-old mother-in-law who is, by her age alone, at high risk if I bring home **ANY** serious illness, not just #COVID19, ought to be enough justification.

However, the example of Havranek should be a warning to anyone who, like me, spends large amounts of time in rooms with local government officials. That’s a very real risk for sick people in the news media.

I’ve been called Typhoid Maurina for years. Why? Because when I go to a school board, if one sick kid has recently coughed on her teacher, and that teacher spreads the sickness to other school staff, there’s a good chance that it will reach the principals or board members or superintendent, and then I’m likely to pick it up when I go to the board meeting. It’s been a standing joke that almost every year, I get seriously sick at a school board meeting and then pass the illness on to other elected officials all over the county while attending city councils and school boards and county commission and health board and sewer board and other government meetings. One of our local elected officials used to threaten to stick me in the rear with a full bovine-sized dose of cow penicillin, and there have been years I was so sick that I might have appreciated that.

Now imagine the consequences if I contract COVID-19 and spread coronavirus all over Pulaski County, effectively shutting down many if not most of the local government offices by forcing everyone who has interacted with me in the last 14 days to go into quarantine.

Take it a step further. Imagine the public backlash with people saying, “Darrell didn’t wear a facemask and now we’re all sick thanks to him. He of all people should know better!”

That’s not merely hypothetical. I missed a meeting of the Laquey R-V School Board shortly after the first COVID-19 cases hit Pulaski County. That meeting was identified by the Pulaski County Health Center as a place where people were in attendance who had been diagnosed with COVID-19.

Not only did I dodge a bullet, a dozen or more government entities in Pulaski County dodged being put under quarantine if I had gone to that meeting, gotten infected, and spread illness all over the county.

How effective are these facemasks? It’s an open question, and the answer is probably “not as effective as we wish.” What seems fairly clear from the medical evidence so far is that the facemasks do a better job of protecting other people from any illness I might have than they do of keeping me from contracting diseases from other people.

I hope a vaccine becomes available soon. When it does, I’ll be one of the first people to take it once it’s available to the general public.

But until then, I think I need to do what I can, however limited its effectiveness may be, to avoid spreading diseases to my family and to more than a dozen government entities in Pulaski County whose meetings I regularly attend.

If you don’t want to wear a mask, that’s your choice. If you want to keep shaking hands, that’s your choice. If you want to sit six inches away from each other rather than the recommended six feet, that’s your choice.

I’ve made my choice.

My choice has precisely nothing to do with politics. COVID-19 is not a Republican or a Democratic disease.

And unless the medical evidence changes, I’m not going to change my decisions as long as I risk the health of my family, and could potentially shut down most governmental entities in our area, if I catch COVID-19 and spread it to others.

That’s not hard to understand. Make your own choices but don’t blame me for my choice.