What It’s Like to Wear a Mask in the South
I knew it had to be more complicated than it seemed on Twitter. So I asked around a bit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/opinion/co...e9f650852d
By Margaret Renkl
Contributing Opinion Writer
June 1, 2020
Wearing a mask has become yet another symbol of the seemingly insurmountable schism between Americans.Credit...William DeShazer for The New York Times
NASHVILLE — I bought four face masks from Etsy early on in this pandemic, anticipating the day when my husband’s 91-year-old father would need to flee his retirement community. Papa saw no reason to leave his apartment while it was coronavirus-free, and we needed to make sure our home was a safe place for him to come to when the virus took hold there. We figured it was just a matter of time.
So far not one resident of my father-in-law’s retirement community has tested positive, and contrary to all predictions, including my own, Tennessee has successfully flattened the curve: Barely more than 350 Tennesseans have died of the coronavirus so far, and the expected run on emergency rooms and intensive care units never happened.
Losing hundreds of people is nothing less than a tragedy — a preventable, brutal, unforgivable tragedy. But in a state with a population of nearly seven million, a death rate of five per 100,000 people means that most Tennesseans have no personal experience with this particular tragedy.
The same is true throughout the South, where death rates are mostly in the single digits. Even in Southern states with a relatively high death rate — like Georgia’s 18 per 100,000 or Louisiana’s 58 — the infections cluster in urban areas. And those relatively high numbers still fall far short of New Jersey’s 126 deaths per 100,000 or New York’s 150. You don’t have to live in a conservative echo chamber to see that this virus has left Trump country more or less untouched.
So far.
There are ominous signs that the virus may be spreading, and rural people in the South will be particularly vulnerable to complications once the virus arrives, as it inevitably will. For the moment, though, things are going about as well as they possibly can in the middle of a worldwide health calamity.
Economically, it’s a different picture altogether. Millions of people here don’t know a single soul who’s gotten sick, but they know plenty of people who have lost their jobs.
A business in Nashville asking patrons to wear masks.Credit...William DeShazer for The New York Times
This is what I tell myself, at least, when I see so much hatred generated by a simple face mask. If the worldwide health calamity hasn’t touched you or anyone you know, while the economic calamity is personal, something you contend with on an hourly basis, maybe it does begin to seem like the health emergency is nothing more than a figment of the liberal imagination. That kind of logic makes no sense in the face of a pandemic that has so far claimed 100,000 American lives, but I understand it.
What I don’t understand is the pure ugliness I keep seeing online. I’m trying to understand what someone could possibly be thinking in calling Rosanne Cash’s daughter “a liberal pussy” for wearing a mask in a Nashville grocery store. I’m trying to understand why a man waving an American flag would also be carrying a sign that reads, “Selfish and proud.” Why someone would hang an effigy of Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, from a tree. Why hateful people would cough in another person’s face to demonstrate their own disdain for masks.
Above all, I’m trying to understand why wearing a mask — which is meant only to protect the most vulnerable among us and slow the spread of the virus to everyone else — has become the political equivalent of wearing a bumper sticker on your face. It makes me weep to think about it: Our one ready-to-hand tool for getting this country back to normal as quickly and as safely as possible has become yet another symbol of the seemingly insurmountable schism between Americans. It’s enough to break a true patriot’s heart.
I was thinking about all this out loud on Facebook the other night, and I asked my family and friends, many of them fellow writers, about their own experiences around the issue of masks. The outpouring of stories stunned me — both the number of people who responded and what they had to say.
The confusion and the fury, it turns out, are on both sides: Sometimes the yelling comes not from a virus-denier but from a mask-wearer in scenarios — outdoors in the early morning, say, with almost no one else on the street — when no reasonable person would think to wear a mask. Sometimes rural people interpret the mask not as a sign of caution and concern but as a sign of active infection. Some of the most conservative people I know are the most enthusiastic about masks, it turns out, and some of the most liberal express doubts about how medically useful a handmade mask really is. “Would you buy a colostomy bag from Etsy?” one friend asked in a private message.
The stories went on and on, and many suggest that attitudes toward masks are already evolving, quietly becoming more common, less divisive. Some of the responses were exactly what you’d expect from this polarizing situation, but many others gave me something to think about that I’d never considered before. Instead of summarizing them all, I’m including a sample of the responses here in case some of them surprise you too:
“I have been making masks for two groups our church is providing them for — an organization that aids the homeless and the Department of Juvenile Justice. I try as I am sewing to be intentional about the act, thinking about who might wear it, hoping they are protected in some way by it and lifting up a prayer for their life, that it might somehow turn for the better in spite of this experience. I find it so sad to think that there are people who maybe are not wearing them simply because they do not know how to get them, can’t afford them or maybe really do not know they need to. It is these among us who I believe most deserve our mercy and our love.”
—Allison Askins
Columbia, S.C.
“Lots of (mostly) women here have started cranking out masks and bringing them to a university center for distribution. One day while we were changing shifts at the center, there were five of us in the kitchen — more than there should have been. We were talking about child rearing. I think we were tired, and tired of being careful, and we were all laughing, the kind of laughing that is a release, the kind that you don’t want to let go of. Then someone who had come to drop off masks walked in. She said, ‘I am sorry. I just had to come inside. I heard you from the parking lot, and it has been so long since I heard laughter. I needed to come inside.’”
—Scott Bishop
Auburn, Ala.
“I saw a woman in the grocery store not wearing a mask, and I said, ‘No mask?’ and she said, ‘You’re not my mother.’”
—Susie Brown
Nashville
“I was in a pharmacy the other day and stepped between some shelves so that a masked employee could pass without us getting too close. She said ‘thank you’ in a tone that made me think she was pleasantly surprised. It has to be tough to be working in these stores with so many customers showing you no consideration at all.”
—Maria Browning
White Bluff, Tenn.
“In the checkout line at the grocery store in Powell, Tenn., the clerk looked at my Ravenclaw mask, nodded knowingly and said, ‘Hufflepuff.’"
—Serenity Gerbman
Murfreesboro, Tenn.
“Over here in East Nashville every other house is swarming with workmen tearing down or rebuilding houses. I walk Zolene every day and had a delightful encounter last week with two guys who had a little dog with them. One guy was wearing a bandana, the other not. But Zolene and Ruby had a hell of a time racing around the tiny front yard. We three watched them fondly, and our masked or unmasked status was completely not an issue. I find that more common now than in those ancient early days when there was a definite sense of tribalism.”
—Lyda Phillips
Nashville
“Many Alabama high schools opted to hold traditional graduations. Our high school scheduled students to graduate individually. That meant our principal stood on a stage for five days, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., wearing a mask and greeting each graduate and family. I’m sure wearing a mask for five days straight was a misery, but it was also an act of love and concern and the best way to keep families safe.”
—Lori Renkl
Homewood, Ala.
“I have been in rural Virginia doing building maintenance on my mom’s farm. There seem to be two main sets of extremely angry people here — those who wear masks, are terrified of the virus, and want outsiders, even property owners, to stay away. Then there are the rabid anti-maskers, with an attitude of ‘Don’t tread on me, this is all being blown out of proportion, I’m not scared of the virus and I’ll fight anyone who makes me wear a mask.’ As a mask-wearing nonresident, it’s been nerve-racking.”
—Louise Sloan
Providence, R.I.
“The medicine aisle in our local grocery store is constricted in both length and breadth. I was looking quickly for the vitamins I wanted when a man without a mask started to enter. I gestured to him to wait for a minute since I was almost done. His response was extreme fury. Gesticulating, he reminded me of how many people die every day from flu and car accidents. I told him that it was for him as much as it was for myself that I was asking him to wait. Then I walked out of the aisle from the other side without picking up what I needed.”
—Smita Swarup
Athens, Ga.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised here in southwest Arkansas that each time I venture into Walmart, masked and gloved, to buy food and supplies for my wife and me and two elderly parents who live with us, more shoppers appear to be wearing masks. In the aisles people are pausing to keep distance. It may be just that we live in a small town, but I’m cautiously (very cautiously) optimistic.”
—Michael Ray Taylor
Arkadelphia, Ark.
“After going for groceries about a mile from our house and feeling stared at for wearing a mask, I took a jaunt to liberal West Knoxville, about a half-hour away. It was my first experience seeing employees wiping down carts and counting heads. Everyone in the store was wearing a mask. I anticipated a copacetic crowd there. What I didn’t expect was to break down crying beside the avocados. The reality of being in a mask-wearing crowd, the validation of the need for masks, being accepted with like-minded shoppers were a relief and a terror to me. Evidently the reality had elbow room to move around inside me when I let down my defenses.”
—Susan O’Dell Underwood
Jefferson City, Tenn.
“On my way to Charlotte, I had to stop at a convenience store for the restroom. I walked far around one employee on a smoke break outside the store. I was the only person of perhaps 20 inside who was masked and was clearly being given the stink eye. I brought a drink to the counter to pay and the employee behind the plexiglass screen asked me if that was all. I said yes, and he said, ‘Take it.’ I was like, ‘Oh thanks, happy Mother’s Day?’ And he said, ‘No, your mask is scaring us.’”
—Kay West
Asheville, N.C
I knew it had to be more complicated than it seemed on Twitter. So I asked around a bit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/opinion/co...e9f650852d
By Margaret Renkl
Contributing Opinion Writer
June 1, 2020
Wearing a mask has become yet another symbol of the seemingly insurmountable schism between Americans.Credit...William DeShazer for The New York Times
NASHVILLE — I bought four face masks from Etsy early on in this pandemic, anticipating the day when my husband’s 91-year-old father would need to flee his retirement community. Papa saw no reason to leave his apartment while it was coronavirus-free, and we needed to make sure our home was a safe place for him to come to when the virus took hold there. We figured it was just a matter of time.
So far not one resident of my father-in-law’s retirement community has tested positive, and contrary to all predictions, including my own, Tennessee has successfully flattened the curve: Barely more than 350 Tennesseans have died of the coronavirus so far, and the expected run on emergency rooms and intensive care units never happened.
Losing hundreds of people is nothing less than a tragedy — a preventable, brutal, unforgivable tragedy. But in a state with a population of nearly seven million, a death rate of five per 100,000 people means that most Tennesseans have no personal experience with this particular tragedy.
The same is true throughout the South, where death rates are mostly in the single digits. Even in Southern states with a relatively high death rate — like Georgia’s 18 per 100,000 or Louisiana’s 58 — the infections cluster in urban areas. And those relatively high numbers still fall far short of New Jersey’s 126 deaths per 100,000 or New York’s 150. You don’t have to live in a conservative echo chamber to see that this virus has left Trump country more or less untouched.
So far.
There are ominous signs that the virus may be spreading, and rural people in the South will be particularly vulnerable to complications once the virus arrives, as it inevitably will. For the moment, though, things are going about as well as they possibly can in the middle of a worldwide health calamity.
Economically, it’s a different picture altogether. Millions of people here don’t know a single soul who’s gotten sick, but they know plenty of people who have lost their jobs.
A business in Nashville asking patrons to wear masks.Credit...William DeShazer for The New York Times
This is what I tell myself, at least, when I see so much hatred generated by a simple face mask. If the worldwide health calamity hasn’t touched you or anyone you know, while the economic calamity is personal, something you contend with on an hourly basis, maybe it does begin to seem like the health emergency is nothing more than a figment of the liberal imagination. That kind of logic makes no sense in the face of a pandemic that has so far claimed 100,000 American lives, but I understand it.
What I don’t understand is the pure ugliness I keep seeing online. I’m trying to understand what someone could possibly be thinking in calling Rosanne Cash’s daughter “a liberal pussy” for wearing a mask in a Nashville grocery store. I’m trying to understand why a man waving an American flag would also be carrying a sign that reads, “Selfish and proud.” Why someone would hang an effigy of Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, from a tree. Why hateful people would cough in another person’s face to demonstrate their own disdain for masks.
Above all, I’m trying to understand why wearing a mask — which is meant only to protect the most vulnerable among us and slow the spread of the virus to everyone else — has become the political equivalent of wearing a bumper sticker on your face. It makes me weep to think about it: Our one ready-to-hand tool for getting this country back to normal as quickly and as safely as possible has become yet another symbol of the seemingly insurmountable schism between Americans. It’s enough to break a true patriot’s heart.
I was thinking about all this out loud on Facebook the other night, and I asked my family and friends, many of them fellow writers, about their own experiences around the issue of masks. The outpouring of stories stunned me — both the number of people who responded and what they had to say.
The confusion and the fury, it turns out, are on both sides: Sometimes the yelling comes not from a virus-denier but from a mask-wearer in scenarios — outdoors in the early morning, say, with almost no one else on the street — when no reasonable person would think to wear a mask. Sometimes rural people interpret the mask not as a sign of caution and concern but as a sign of active infection. Some of the most conservative people I know are the most enthusiastic about masks, it turns out, and some of the most liberal express doubts about how medically useful a handmade mask really is. “Would you buy a colostomy bag from Etsy?” one friend asked in a private message.
The stories went on and on, and many suggest that attitudes toward masks are already evolving, quietly becoming more common, less divisive. Some of the responses were exactly what you’d expect from this polarizing situation, but many others gave me something to think about that I’d never considered before. Instead of summarizing them all, I’m including a sample of the responses here in case some of them surprise you too:
“I have been making masks for two groups our church is providing them for — an organization that aids the homeless and the Department of Juvenile Justice. I try as I am sewing to be intentional about the act, thinking about who might wear it, hoping they are protected in some way by it and lifting up a prayer for their life, that it might somehow turn for the better in spite of this experience. I find it so sad to think that there are people who maybe are not wearing them simply because they do not know how to get them, can’t afford them or maybe really do not know they need to. It is these among us who I believe most deserve our mercy and our love.”
—Allison Askins
Columbia, S.C.
“Lots of (mostly) women here have started cranking out masks and bringing them to a university center for distribution. One day while we were changing shifts at the center, there were five of us in the kitchen — more than there should have been. We were talking about child rearing. I think we were tired, and tired of being careful, and we were all laughing, the kind of laughing that is a release, the kind that you don’t want to let go of. Then someone who had come to drop off masks walked in. She said, ‘I am sorry. I just had to come inside. I heard you from the parking lot, and it has been so long since I heard laughter. I needed to come inside.’”
—Scott Bishop
Auburn, Ala.
“I saw a woman in the grocery store not wearing a mask, and I said, ‘No mask?’ and she said, ‘You’re not my mother.’”
—Susie Brown
Nashville
“I was in a pharmacy the other day and stepped between some shelves so that a masked employee could pass without us getting too close. She said ‘thank you’ in a tone that made me think she was pleasantly surprised. It has to be tough to be working in these stores with so many customers showing you no consideration at all.”
—Maria Browning
White Bluff, Tenn.
“In the checkout line at the grocery store in Powell, Tenn., the clerk looked at my Ravenclaw mask, nodded knowingly and said, ‘Hufflepuff.’"
—Serenity Gerbman
Murfreesboro, Tenn.
“Over here in East Nashville every other house is swarming with workmen tearing down or rebuilding houses. I walk Zolene every day and had a delightful encounter last week with two guys who had a little dog with them. One guy was wearing a bandana, the other not. But Zolene and Ruby had a hell of a time racing around the tiny front yard. We three watched them fondly, and our masked or unmasked status was completely not an issue. I find that more common now than in those ancient early days when there was a definite sense of tribalism.”
—Lyda Phillips
Nashville
“Many Alabama high schools opted to hold traditional graduations. Our high school scheduled students to graduate individually. That meant our principal stood on a stage for five days, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., wearing a mask and greeting each graduate and family. I’m sure wearing a mask for five days straight was a misery, but it was also an act of love and concern and the best way to keep families safe.”
—Lori Renkl
Homewood, Ala.
“I have been in rural Virginia doing building maintenance on my mom’s farm. There seem to be two main sets of extremely angry people here — those who wear masks, are terrified of the virus, and want outsiders, even property owners, to stay away. Then there are the rabid anti-maskers, with an attitude of ‘Don’t tread on me, this is all being blown out of proportion, I’m not scared of the virus and I’ll fight anyone who makes me wear a mask.’ As a mask-wearing nonresident, it’s been nerve-racking.”
—Louise Sloan
Providence, R.I.
“The medicine aisle in our local grocery store is constricted in both length and breadth. I was looking quickly for the vitamins I wanted when a man without a mask started to enter. I gestured to him to wait for a minute since I was almost done. His response was extreme fury. Gesticulating, he reminded me of how many people die every day from flu and car accidents. I told him that it was for him as much as it was for myself that I was asking him to wait. Then I walked out of the aisle from the other side without picking up what I needed.”
—Smita Swarup
Athens, Ga.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised here in southwest Arkansas that each time I venture into Walmart, masked and gloved, to buy food and supplies for my wife and me and two elderly parents who live with us, more shoppers appear to be wearing masks. In the aisles people are pausing to keep distance. It may be just that we live in a small town, but I’m cautiously (very cautiously) optimistic.”
—Michael Ray Taylor
Arkadelphia, Ark.
“After going for groceries about a mile from our house and feeling stared at for wearing a mask, I took a jaunt to liberal West Knoxville, about a half-hour away. It was my first experience seeing employees wiping down carts and counting heads. Everyone in the store was wearing a mask. I anticipated a copacetic crowd there. What I didn’t expect was to break down crying beside the avocados. The reality of being in a mask-wearing crowd, the validation of the need for masks, being accepted with like-minded shoppers were a relief and a terror to me. Evidently the reality had elbow room to move around inside me when I let down my defenses.”
—Susan O’Dell Underwood
Jefferson City, Tenn.
“On my way to Charlotte, I had to stop at a convenience store for the restroom. I walked far around one employee on a smoke break outside the store. I was the only person of perhaps 20 inside who was masked and was clearly being given the stink eye. I brought a drink to the counter to pay and the employee behind the plexiglass screen asked me if that was all. I said yes, and he said, ‘Take it.’ I was like, ‘Oh thanks, happy Mother’s Day?’ And he said, ‘No, your mask is scaring us.’”
—Kay West
Asheville, N.C
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