What is your position on masking?

What is my position on masking?

As a school board candidate: I do not have a position on masking. Decisions about whether and when kids and teachers are asked to wear masks in schools are not made by the school board or by the schools’ administrators. They are made by the county health department. I sincerely hope it is never again necessary for our kids to wear masks in school. But if I have a position, it is that the school administrators should abide by applicable laws.

As a private individual: I do not enjoy masking. It is a nuisance. (And I am an adult; for children it may be far more difficult.) But I do not consider myself to be an expert in virology or epidemiology, and I don’t want to get sick if I don’t have to, and I want to follow the biblical command to love thy neighbor as thyself, so, following the advice of the medical professionals as I understand it, I sometimes wear a mask.

Someone who watched the video of the recent school board meeting has posted this photograph with this comment:

The person you see in the orange shirt in that photograph is me.

What you see in the poster’s comment is an unintelligent and uncharitable inference from the photograph.

I was masked because I had just spent three full days in a conference near Boston with sixty other people (only a couple of whom, not including myself, were masked), and then about twenty hours in airports and planes getting back home (where I was masked much of the time, but most others were not). So I thought it common decency to mask rather than sit unmasked in a crowded meeting room exhaling whatever I might have picked up in my travels.

The pertinent question here is not: What is your position on masking? The pertinent question is: What is your position on drawing unwarranted inferences from photographs, making and broadcasting adverse assumptions about people’s motives rather than asking them about their motives, and in general being nasty to people you assume you don’t like although you have never talked with them? My answer: I am opposed to all those things. I will not do those things as a school board member. We can and must choose to think well of each other and treat each other well.

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