To mask or not to mask, that is NOT the question.

It’s not up for debate.  You go outside, you wear the f-n mask.  If you don’t you get fined $10,000 the first time.  The second time you go to jail.

And yes, I’m a liberal.

Jail is the last place you want to be in a national pandemic but jail is where you will go for not adhering to the #1 medically approved way you can best protect yourself and others from contracting and spreading COVID-19. If you’ve ever watched any of the Law and Order shows (Note: And at this point in our lives, who hasn’t?) you’ve doubtless seen the one about the person who knowingly spreads some very contagious, possibly lethal disease and is charged for assault or even murder in court for callously using their bodily fluids as their weapon of choice.

So, life imitates art, right?  And we haven’t even started on death.

Then why don’t we?

I live in California and we now have the dubious distinction of being #1 in the country for COVID-19 infections.  More than half a million and counting.  We were doing okay for a while but since businesses reopened in the last couple of months we’ve seen a sharp surge or spike or whatever you want to call it in cases.  

Our death rate (Note: Almost 9224 people so far) is not quite commensurate with other hot spots but health care in California is a bit better than it is in other states.  Still, we’re catching up (Note: 219 dead in the last 24 hours) and if this continues, well, watch your back, America!  We’re gonna contribute mightily to the almost 160,000 and counting Americans who have already perished, with no end in sight.

(Note: FYI, that is more Americans killed than in the Vietnam, War, Gulf War, Afghanistan War, Iraq War AND Korean War combined).

California has for decades been known as the place that nationwide trends originate.  This has been both good and bad.  Sadly, we gave you the Valley Girl but on the good side Silicon Valley did revolutionize the world.

On second thought, perhaps that wasn’t as good as we figured.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 40 years and have heard all the jokes, the jealousies and the jerk-offs who put us down but secretly long to be or at least borrow from us.  They haven’t really bothered me because even though I’m a New Yorker through and through California won me over long ago.

It had a freedom, an openness and a sea of possibilities that I was never able to find or be comfortable with on the east coast or in my wonderful New York City.  To this day I love the east coast, New York especially, but it simply isn’t California.

And yet these days that’s the last thing New York, or any state should try to be.

As my husband travelled in the car this Los Angeles afternoon, he drove through the somewhat busy streets of West Hollywood and spotted packed tables of people seated in sidewalk cafes, browsing store windows or simply walking and jogging all up and down the streets without masks.

At his count at least 50% of the people he saw had ZERO face coverings.

WHAT THE F-CK!!!!????

I don’t get why this is so hard.

I do get that this mask thing has become somewhat political and that many members of the Republican Party are choosing to go mask-less as a political statement against Democratic liberals.  Even the recent death of 2016 Republican presidential aspirant Herman Cain from COVID, which was diagnosed right after he attended that huge Trump rally mask-less in Tulsa, Oklahoma, hasn’t stopped them.

But West Hollywood ain’t Tulsa, you’ll just have to trust me on that.  You have as much chance of attending a Trump rally here as you do of buying a ticket to an AOC fundraiser in Tulsa’s BOK Center, the downtown stadium where Mr. Cain and thousands of others exchanged air, spittle and who knows what other types of bodily fluids back in June to kick off Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

So again, let’s pose the open question – WHAT. THE.  F-K.  GIVES?????

I say this pretty much sequestered in my house – high-risk group member that I am, and a very vocal one – and at the end of my rope.  I mean, I love my house, don’t get me wrong, and I know I’m A LOT more fortunate than most.  But even I don’t want to be here for the rest of my life.

However, I will be if the alternative means taking my life (and yours) in my hands because my fellow citizens are too dumb, selfish and/or vain to mask up.

My bet is that it could take the hot spot illnesses and underestimated deaths nationwide of thousands of teenagers once school begins to get people motivated.  But then again, the slaughter of an entire classroom of  6 and 7 year olds by a lone gunman with an assault weapon didn’t foster much of a change almost a decade ago to our nation’s gun laws, so perhaps I’m mistaken.

We Americans are a really, really, really strange breed.  We elect our first African American president and then eight years later turn around and put a White Supremacist racist (Note: Can you be one without the other?) in the White House.

We could easily do a similar reverse turnaround on masks and COVID-19.  Or we could just let the virus spread further, mutate and mow a good 25-50% of our population down (Note: FYI, that’s 80-160 million people sick and/or dead) and make the decision for us.

Count on me to be at home, watching it unfold from my safe house in California.  If you happen to pass by I’ll be the one screaming obscenities at the window at you if you’re showing too much nose, mouth or skin as I wonder who the f-ck we are and what the f-ck we have all become.

The Eagles – “Hotel California”