I was one of the ones pricing N95 masks when my deductive reasoning said cloth masks were nonsense. Chinese people were having seizures and dying in the streets for crying out loud! This was the big one, why we had all these preps!!

Then funny enough, I first got creeped out when Fauci got up and said masks don't do anything, they're ineffective, specifically talking about the cloth or surgical ones. So I'm sitting there pricing SCUBA gear at this point thinking, "no shit Sherlock, where did they find this guy?"

By the time Fauci flipped back to saying everyone 2-days-old and up had to mask up between bites at dinner, it was clear to ALL OF THE PEOPLE I KNOW that this was not the Spanish Flu. Even the hysterical ones would admit they personally weren't as concerned as they were play-acting (leaving just the hysterics...funny, that).

But still the demands. Mandates are still EVERYWHERE. I kept my kid out of...get this...a civil rights museum in a red state, due to their mask mandate. This wasn't 2020, this was weeks ago. That the administrator there walks this earth still is proof-positive that death from irony is not possible. People died, most of them got to see it coming, too. Lingering on a transplant list didn't happen to me or my family but I'm human enough to wince every time I think about it. A former pastor watched his daughter die through plexiglass, and being on other side of the plexiglass is a large part of why she died in the first place.

Not that it's a contest to make people cry. I just read comments like Karl's about "that hasn't happened to me so I haven't hoisted the black flag." Same, and now I'm afraid, because I also know I'm not exceptional. Do I have a black flag to hoist when all these others clearly don't?