This is for all the nurses out there on the frontline, risking their lives for others. It is especially for Ruth, who died of the plague in 1919. She was a hero back in my family’s history, whose sacrifice has always been hard for me to understand. Unconventional, well- educated at a time when women were still being actively barred from higher education, she went into nursing around the time of the Spanish Flu pandemic of the last century. When she was about 27, a sailor came into the San Francisco bay with the plague, and she and a doctor both volunteered to treat him in quarantine.

This was a decade before the discovery of antibiotics, and Ruth stepped up even though she knew she would likely not be able to save the man, and that she, too, would probably catch the disease and die of it. Indeed, none of the three survived.

I wondered at her sacrifice. She was so young, and to my childhood mind she’d thrown her life away for nothing. “She was a hero, though,” the explanation went. I never did fully understand that sacrifice, just as I don’t understand, right now, in the midst of this pandemic, why frontline healthcare workers are expected to risk their lives caring for ignoramus fools refusing to wear masks when masks are the only thing slowing the spread of deadly virions.

If you refuse to wear a mask, I do not believe you are entitled to the services of the over- stressed healthcare system or the ministrations of self-sacrificing nurses like Ruth. Nobody should have to be put at risk because you were too stupid and too selfish to wear a fucking mask.

There has been an accidental experiment in this country, and the results are in. Two groups of people risked social contact last month. In one group, hundreds of thousands of people left lockdown and took to the streets to protest racism and police violence after yet another killing of yet another unarmed black person. Virtually ALL of them wore masks.

The other group was people who wanted haircuts and pool parties and pints at the local bar, and insisted that masks were “infringing” upon their “freedom” to act like stupid, selfish, CHOADS.

After the demonstrations, covid-19 testing was made widely available to anyone who had attended, and people were encouraged to get the test. There has been ZERO spike from the demonstrations. However, the opening of bars and restaurants and the throwing of parties has re- fanned the flames until the virus is once again burning out of control. The only difference between the group spreading the virus right now, and the one not spreading it, is MASKS.

PUT a FUCKING MASK ON.