Who would have dreamed a year ago that the cashier at your local drugstore would have a new line in their job description: the mask police?
We're all familiar with that now, but we're not all playing nice about it.
TV news reports have been filled with accounts of confrontations between store workers asking customers to mask up. A worker at a Flint Family Dollar was shot and killed in one such confrontation. It's easy to find cellphone videos of people exploding.
My local CVS store has taken sign-posting to new levels, with signs both professionally made and hand-scrawled telling customers that masks are REQUIRED to enter the store. I counted eight signs as I made my way in, one placed on the entrance floor so you have to walk around it. You could not conceivably miss them.
Still, there are customers who are maskless, in a drugstore, where sick people pick up prescriptions.
But someone has to enforce these rules, and it's a lot to ask of a store clerk, especially when emotions run so highly. But that's taught many customers that those rules aren't real and that they can get away with it.
The science is very clear: Masks help prevent the spread of the virus. Countries where mask wearing is more universally accepted have had a much easier time keeping the spread under control.
Japan, where mask wearing was accepted even before COVID-19 struck, never had anything like the outbreak that we've seen in the U.S.
A large group of Michigan restaurants has put out a statement called the MI Restaurant Promise that uses both moral and practical arguments to convince customers to put on masks when they're not eating.
They promise customers that they'll take all necessary precautions to protect diners' safety. And ask that their customers do the same in return, without a fight.
I hope that argument wins the day.
It's an existential question for those restaurants. Last week, Michigan went backwards on its reopening, with bars that get more than 70 percent of their sales from alcohol again being forced to close indoor areas by order of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Restaurants know they'll be next if current increases in coronavirus cases don't start going in the other direction.
"We recognize that Gov. Whitmer's latest executive order was largely a stay of execution for the restaurant industry, given the more expansive measures taken in several other states," Michigan Restaurant & Lodging Association President and CEO Justin Winslow said in a statement.
"This order is just the latest reminder that if we want to retain the things we love — like a great meal with friends and family — we all must bear greater responsibility for our collective safety or grieve its absence," he added.
It's beyond unfortunate that masks became yet another political division in this country. And officials clearly made an enormous mistake early in the pandemic when they asked people not to wear masks in order to save them for front-line responders — by saying they didn't do much to prevent the disease.
We know now that wasn't actually true, and this is an object lesson in not lying to people for their own good. It always comes back to bite you.
And calls are growing for the president to be seen wearing a mask from time to time, simply to serve as an example. But I think as Americans, who bristle at being told what to do, we'd be having this same argument with any president. After all, we did during the Spanish flu a century ago.
It's hard for me to understand the emotions this issue stirs up.
I may be screaming into the wind here, but I wear a mask in public simply because I think it's polite to the people around me. I would do the same even if I thought they weren't really all that effective, because I don't want to alarm people around me with my presence.
But it's clear that persuasion isn't working universally. Maybe it's time for the state to take the enforcement out of the hands of store clerks, and start writing a few tickets.
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Commentary: Let's make it unnecessary for stores to be mask police - Crain's Detroit Business
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