I was sitting on a bus in San Francisco wearing the face mask I purchased for the smoke days the fall before. It was February 2020, and I had heard in January about Covid-19 taking hold in China. My bus goes through Chinatown, and most people in Chinatown were already wearing masks, so I figured I’d follow suit.
I am also a mother who bare-handed sneezed-out toddler boogers enough to know that claiming that a virus only spreads by touching something infected and then touching your face is illogical and highly unlikely.
So I put my mask on just before I got on the bus, and took it off when I got off.
Most people ignored me. Seeing odd things is not unusual in San Francisco, so a short, skinny, white woman with gray hair wearing a mask on a bus was unremarkable.
But on this particular day in February, as the directives from the White House insisted that the disease could not be transmitted in the air, someone on the bus took issue with my mask.
He was a younger, middle-aged, white man with tattoos and a skateboard, not the kind of guy you’d expect to make unsolicited comments on a stranger’s personal choices. He boarded the bus, took a look at me, and kindly told me I didn’t need to worry … the virus only spreads by direct contact. I didn’t need a mask. Just wash your hands and don’t touch your face. He said it as if he were gently scolding his grandmother (I am not that old, by the way, but I guess my gray hair evoked something in him).
I know better than to engage in substantive argumentation with strangers on public transportation, particularly as a woman being mansplained (yet again). So I shrugged, as if to say, “I’ll do me, you do you” and looked away. He repeated himself, more insistent. I shot him a look over my mask, then turned away again and ignored him. He felt compelled to say it again, to someone nearby, as if looking for support. The moment passed, and we all moved on with our lives.
This man clearly was listening to Trump and his enablers who, knowing full well that they were lying in a manner that would cost tens of thousands of lives, gave us all deadly and economically devastating misinformation for political gain.
In February 2020, Donald Trump admitted on the record, in a recorded conversation, that Covid-19 was far more deadly than seasonal flu AND airborne. At nearly the same moment, I was on the bus, months ahead of my time in my mask, being scolded and mansplained by someone who I choose to believe meant well but who was being fed a pack of deadly, inexcusable lies.
Wrap your head around that, then #VoteTHEMOut
