Mask stories: fines and troubles
There can be fines of up to $6000 for people refusing to wear a mask on public transit.
Global reports on a woman who really cannot wear a mask because she has trigeminal neuralgia. (My mother had this condition for a time, and it really is hell. You can’t let anything touch your face without risking terrible nerve pain, yet it’s totally invisible to observers.) This woman is running into difficulties because there have been so many people falsely claiming they can’t wear a mask because they have health conditions, possibly waving bogus documents, that people in stores simply don’t believe her.
Some graduates of Loyola High School are calling out a teacher at that school who has been posting a lot of anti-mask propaganda and related conspiracy theories. Do students “look up to professors and teachers” though? I seem to recall thinking our high school teachers were mostly pretty strange folks – yes, they had some power over us, some we liked more than others, but many openly had quirks and idées fixes and were hardly role models. Maybe things have changed.
jeather 13:22 on 2020-07-23 Permalink
I don’t know the laws here, but in the US it’s legal to say that people who can’t wear masks have to get (free) curbside pickup/delivery instead of going into the grocery store. I am not in any way saying she is lying about her disability, but the process of accommodating it doesn’t necessarily involve “ok just go wherever without a mask”.
Dhomas 15:20 on 2020-07-23 Permalink
I went to Loyola and I know this teacher. This teacher is quite liked by his students. He had a lot of ideas that were outside of the mainstream (think things like Eastern medicine or mysticism), and would speak so confidently about them that he was quite convincing. This was one of the reasons he was so popular. He is dangerous as he is well educated and an effective communicator, and he knows how to play semantics quite well. For example, in a Facebook post, when someone would tell him that masks are important, he would respond with something like “masks do very little to protect the wearer”. This is not false, but it sidesteps the point: wearing masks protects others FROM the wearer, so if enough people wear them we protect a lot of people, just like herd immunity with vaccines (which he is also against). His response to the report does something similar: one of the interviewees says that he is *followed* by many of his students, to which he responds “I am not friends with any current students”. Again, this is not a complete answer, and I think he knows it. His students can follow him on Facebook and see his public posts (all his anti-mask stuff was posted publicly) without being his Facebook friend.
A little more context I can add is that the school was contacted by alumni on this topic, and they received no response for nearly two weeks. So, some of them went to the media with the story, at which point the school responded the very same day.
This guy was fun in high school with his quirky theories and alternative literature, but he seems to have gone full QAnon Trumper at this point.
Jack 17:37 on 2020-07-23 Permalink
At least he’s not Opus Dei….that would be mortifying.
MtlWeb 18:56 on 2020-07-23 Permalink
Wow. Both my sons went to Loyola and one had and adored this teacher. He did have a different approach to connecting with students and it was obviously effective as many students enjoyed his classes. Wife (chaperone) and son went on his class’ European trip one spring and she can remember him commenting about the vaccine directives from public health..nothing sinister but remarks in jest.
Blork 21:30 on 2020-07-23 Permalink
This is a very different time and place from where I went to school. Back there/then, we did not look up to teachers, nor for the most part parents, priests, or anyone over 25 really. They were all “the man” and were (in our eyes) necessarily corrupt, authoritarian, boring, full of hang-ups, etc. Kids now seem to be the polar opposite, which is nice in many ways (i.e., less stupid rebellion for its own sake, able to communicate across generations, etc.) but almost too far in a lot of cases. IMO kids should respect their elders and learn from them, etc., but not necessarily revere them.
Kate 00:34 on 2020-07-24 Permalink
Jack, we had one teacher at my high school who was Opus Dei, and he was a piece of work.