Pat Furr: Some currently relevant idioms and adages

To The Daily Sun,

Adages, idioms, and proverbs endure through the years. Here are a few that have relevance in regarding our current anti-mask crowd.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it.” You are probably like the rest of us and want the economy to be opened and chugging along, you want your kids to go to school, and you would like to go out to dinner or stop by your favorite watering hole. But you also want to express your individual freedom by not wearing a mask. Wearing a mask in public will expedite our return to some semblance of normalcy. Please connect those two dots.

“Cannot see the forest for the trees.” Being so focused on your individual freedoms misses the big picture. Let’s call it community. Refusing to wear a mask falls squarely into a more recent saying. “Hooray for me and the heck with everyone else.”

A lesser known adage but one my father used a fair bit is this: “I may not always be right, but I am never in doubt. To you anti-mask types, I have no other way to say this other than you are flat wrong in thinking that wearing a mask doesn’t reduce the spread of C-19. It does. And it does so quite effectively, with very little effort other than being thoughtful and getting over your selfish need to feel “free”.

“Character is the moral strength to do the right thing even when it costs more than you want to pay.” Choose some other battle to fight that is actually meaningful and less destructive when you feel your freedoms threatened. I know that it is inconvenient to wear a mask. It’s also inconvenient to be on a respirator, or turned away from a hospital because it is overwhelmed. Crammed into the cabin of an H-60 Pavehawk wearing sixty pounds of kit, kneeling for hours on end while fighting off freezing or scorching temperatures in a combat zone wasn’t all that convenient for me. But I knew why I was doing it. Ask yourself honestly why you are refusing to wear a mask. What is the cost to you to do so?

Lastly “Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” I had an encounter with a man at the DMV in Concord yesterday. I very politely asked him if he would please pull his mask up over his nose. It was as if I told him his dog was the ugliest critter walking the earth. He immediately got all bowed up. He told me to shut up and that he would only cover his nose if one of the DMV staff instructed him too. I imagine that the DMV has a standing policy not to confront morons. I didn’t say that to him, but my point is, how is it such an affront to politely ask someone to do the right thing?

Okay, I’ve said my piece so let the potshots begin.

Pat Furr

Laconia