Thanks to a tweet from William Teach, I found this article from Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker:

Put your masks back on, please

By Kathleen Parker | Friday, October 28, 2022 | 4:43 PM EDT

CAMDEN, S.C. — There is a tradition in my family of retreating to the woods when illness strikes.

One of my Revolutionary War forefathers, Tarleton Brown of Barnwell, S.C., had to abandon the siege of Augusta in 1781 when he contracted smallpox and returned home, such as it was.

The British, alas, had preceded him, reducing his family’s home to ash and leaving both his father and little brother dead. His mother and sister miraculously escaped both the king’s army and “the Indians,” as he put it in his 1862 memoir, “Memoirs of Tarleton Brown: A Captain of the Revolutionary Army” — a 28-page pamphlet published in New York and “Written by Himself.”

Now, why put it that way? “(T)he Indians” was the only part Miss Parker quoted directly, so she could have, if she doesn’t like the term “Indians”, used native Americans or indigenous Americans. Instead, she threw shade on a colonial American, one of her ancestors and a brave revolutionary soldier who risked his own life fighting for our independence, for using the term almost universally used in his time and culture.

Skipping over several paragraphs in which Miss Parker told us about what she called “The Covid Cottage,” an in-the-woods hut in which some of her family and she isolated when positive with the virus, she got to the parts I find important:

We’re not by a long shot. Despite our best efforts to thwart the virus that leads to covid — and despite my own adherence to best practices — it got me again.

That’s two vaccinations, two boosters, and now, two covids — appropriate for a Libra, I suppose.

If Miss Parker adhered to “best practices,” I assume that she was masked as well at the “packed art gallery” in which she believes she contracted the virus. Yet, with all of that, she still got the virus! Which leads me to ask: why does she believe that we should all mask up again, since her own “adherence to best practices” did not prevent her from contracting the virus again?

Her most telling line was:

But I’ll tell you what’s everywhere — covid-19, and it smells your fear.

Yup, she told the truth: she’s haunted by fear. But if the SARS-CoV-2 virus “smells (our) fear,” then the way to avoid it is to not be afraid of it! 🙂

I have no complaint about her article, in that she is asking people to start wearing masks again, rather than demanding that the government impose mask mandates; asking people to do something is very well within her freedom of speech and of the press. But while I agree with the sensible precautions of getting vaccinated, I will not succumb to mindless, mind-killing fear.