We are facing the greatest threat to American lives since the Second World War, and even then we did not have our fellow citizens dying at the rate that they have been since March. Doctors and public health experts tell us that if we wear masks in public and back off on some social events we will save tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives. Despite that advice, some businesses around here do not care if their customers do not wear masks, and some people just cannot be bothered to put on a mask for a few minutes when they go into a store. Is that really too much to ask to save the lives of your friends and neighbors, to prevent hospitals from being so overloaded that they cannot care for all of the sick, to keep the people who work at the stores where you get your food safe? If we ask our servicemembers to risk their lives in foreign wars, we should be willing to live with a minor personal inconvenience to counter a threat that has killed far more Americans than every war we have been in since 1945.
Edward R. Shaw
Brainerd
