LogFAQs > #954935236

TomNook posted...

While it's good to look out for your fellow man, you really have to wonder where to draw the line on this kind of thinking. Do you wear a mask for the rest of your life because of people with an even worse immune system who could be killed by your common cold? Do you never drive a car again because you might cause an accident? Avoiding any kind of disagreement with people in real life and online because of the possibility of them having a mental condition where they do harm to themselves? I understand the mentality of wanting to look out for people...but it gets to a point where it's impractical and you really can't live your life in any realistic manner if you let it get to you. I think it's just better to follow the general scientific guidelines that are being established for a society to function again, rather than one's own interpretations.

It is reasonable to ask how much inconvenience someone should go to in order to keep themselves and other safe, but remember, the pandemic is still going on, and it's still pretty bad in some parts of the country. You've made some false equivalences here - the inconvenience of wearing a mask is nowhere near the same as not driving a car or not speaking to other people. Really, for many of us, the cost of wearing a mask is almost nothing, so it doesn't hurt to wear one, certainly at least while the pandemic is still happening, which again, it is. (By the way, the risks of driving an automobile and the risk of negatively impacting another person's mental health are two things that I think people don't take half as seriously as they should.)

While there are certainly parts of the world where there are people who want vaccinated, yet can't get it yet, that doesn't apply to most of the US (and that's only going to become more and more true). So the people you are perceiving in your mind as being afraid of you for not wearing a mask are mostly going to be people who have actively chosen not to get the vaccine. Everyone I know in real life who doesn't have the vaccine has chosen that they don't want it for various reasons. I'm not saying my life experience here is the same for everyone...but I'm not even in one of the top states, and is true for me.

Sorry but that's just not true where I live - only as of last week was it possible for all people 18+ to be past the two-week waiting period after the second moderna shot, and that's only if you got an appointment immediately, which was difficult to do at the start of the eligibility period, and I'm not going to condemn someone just because they didn't get the vaccine immediately as soon as possible. This, combined with the fact that there are people who can't get vaccinated, and also the fact that I still want to protect people who are unvaccinated by choice even if they're idiots (they can pass it onto other vulnerable people, after all - we are not just individuals, we're part of a system), means that I do still prioritize the safety of unvaccinated individuals. And even if they're vaccinated, I frankly just don't want people to think that I might be putting others at risk! Nobody wants to be mistaken for an asshole in public, unless you're an asshole.

I have, as you'll notice, given a reasonable line at which I think wearing masks indoors won't really have any effect, medically or socially, and we haven't hit it. If everyone were wearing masks, regardless of whether or not they believed it was necessary (because some people are going to be wrong about that), we might get there faster.