“We want our country back. We’re not going to be wearing masks forever,” Donald Trump said this week when asked whether his administration would consider calling on Americans to wear masks en masse as the coronavirus pandemic ravages the nation, signaling that he wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea.
His comments came amid reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is rethinking guidance it’s been issuing for months: that people who aren’t sick or caring for someone who is need not wear face masks when they venture out in public.
The president seemed to be implying that a masked country couldn’t be our country—that such a sight would be alien and alarming, and thus hopefully a short-lived ordeal. It was an expression of the stigma long attached to mask-wearing in the Western world, unlike in many Asian countries, where those who don’t wear masks during public-health crises are the ones who are stigmatized. While an American might walk into a grocery store these days and view the proliferating number of masked shoppers as crushing confirmation that the apocalypse is nigh, someone in Hong Kong or South Korea might see the same scene as an uplifting indication that the community is coalescing to fend off catastrophe.
It would be simplistic to state that the stigmatization of mask-wearing in the West, and the corresponding lag in Western ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
