{"id":1819,"date":"2020-12-29T12:57:47","date_gmt":"2020-12-29T19:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/?p=1819"},"modified":"2020-12-29T12:57:47","modified_gmt":"2020-12-29T19:57:47","slug":"masks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/masks\/","title":{"rendered":"Masks"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sorry.\u00a0 I just don’t get it.\u00a0 Why would any human being purposefully\u00a0not<\/em> wear a mask?<\/p>\n

Homo<\/em> Sapiens<\/em> have been a around for thousands of years and during that time, our species has done a good job of conqueri<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ng the Earth.\u00a0 We are incredibly successful.\u00a0 We have moved into almost every nook and cranny of living space.\u00a0 We have exploited natural resources for shelter, food, clothing and convenience.\u00a0 We no longer have natural predators….almost.<\/p>\n

The saber-tooth tiger?\u00a0 History!\u00a0 Bears,\u00a0wolves, wild cats haven’t been threats for a few thousand years.<\/p>\n

Yet one predator remains – and it is nasty.\u00a0 Microbes have devastated\u00a0Homo Sapiens<\/em> throughout recorded history.\u00a0 Until the discovery of penicillin, we were helpless against bacteria.\u00a0 It wasn’t so very long ago – in Earth time – that the Black Death swept across the known world, wiping out entire villages and decimating cities.\u00a0 People didn’t know what caused it.\u00a0 The greatest doctors in Paris had only supernatural causes.\u00a0 God’s judgment was the prevailing theory.\u00a0 Fear resided in every home.\u00a0 Epidemics like cholera killed large swaths of the population in the early years of this country’s history.\u00a0 Typhoid killed Abraham Lincoln’s beloved son, Willie.\u00a0 People didn’t know what caused it and they didn’t know what to do about it.\u00a0 The helplessness against these constant threats have receded into the past and are forgotten.<\/p>\n

Microbes, like viruses, are the perfect predator of our kind.\u00a0 They are invisible.\u00a0 They enter our bodies and set up shop in our cells.\u00a0 They turn our cells into little manufacturing plants and because they exist in numbers that are too vast for us to comprehend and they replicate so quickly, they are uniquely able to mutate into other forms that can attack us in new, previously unimagined and very efficient ways.<\/p>\n

If you were to tell the ancient (and not-so-ancient) people that in the future, people would know what caused these plagues and knew how to halt or slow its spread, they would say, “Give me some of that!”\u00a0 We live in a fortunate age in the history of man and woman-kind – to have tools to protect ourselves from these invisible predators.\u00a0 Yet, somehow, millions of people act as if this history never occurred – as if microbes haven’t killed us for thousands of years and don’t have the capacity to do it all over again.<\/p>\n

These tiniest of tiny creatures float in the air, pushed out by the exhalations of their hosts.\u00a0 We breathe them in and they are able to set up shop again,\u00a0in us<\/em>!\u00a0 How do we protect ourselves from this unseen predator that wants to take over our bodies for their own purposes (leaving hundreds of thousands dying as they gasp for breath and even more struggling with the aftermath of the infection that doesn’t kill them)?<\/p>\n

Masks.\u00a0 They prevent the infected from blowing the invisible killers into the air and the uninfected from breathing in these agents of sickness and death.\u00a0 Those who reject masks are acting like we don’t have thousands of years of history marked by periods of terror as sickness killed, frightened and overwhelmed us.\u00a0 The ancients would be shaking their heads in utter disbelief at the madness of those who reject the mask.\u00a0 Come to think of it, I’m shaking my head today in utter disbelief.<\/p>\n

Exercise care!\u00a0 Stay safe!\u00a0 Protect your health and the health of those around you.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m sorry.\u00a0 I just don’t get it.\u00a0 Why would any human being purposefully\u00a0not wear a mask? Homo Sapiens have been a around for thousands of years and during that time, our species has done a good job of conqueri ng the Earth.\u00a0 We are incredibly successful.\u00a0 We have moved into almost every nook and cranny Continue reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[48,50],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1819"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1821,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1819\/revisions\/1821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/josephshaub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}