People are dumb and I’m one of them
How three news events got turned into one inadvisable cartoon...
So over the weekend I read an editorial in the Kansas City Star that said Kansas has 105 counties and 15 of those counties have mandatory masks orders. After the counties were given the option of accepting or rejecting Gov. Laura Kelly’s mask mandate, 90 counties said no thanks.
Unsurprisingly, the 15 counties with mask orders have seen a greater decline in coronavirus cases than the 90 counties that don’t have an order.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Dr. Lee Norman said all the decline in cases “comes from those counties wearing masks.”
Dr. Sanmi Areola, director of the Johnson County Department of Health and Environment said: “Masks work.”
Whether they intended to or not, the good and not-so-good people of Kansas provided yet another example of why we need to wear masks in public.
OK, tuck that information away because you’re going to need it later.
People ask where cartoonists get their ideas and mine often come from reading about two or three different news events and then drawing – figuratively and literally – a connection.
So after reading about Kansas and mask orders, I read about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally which takes place in Sturgis, South Dakota and lasts 10 days. Not too late to get there if you start now.
They expect about 250,000 people to show up and they don’t expect too many of them to wear masks or observe social distancing. The health experts fear a “super spreader” event.
A New York Times article quoted one guy who planned on wearing a mask, but most of the people the NYT talked to either didn’t believe the coronavirus was a real thing – thank you social media – or were fatalistic about the consequences. One guy said, “If I die from the virus, it was just meant to be” which is fine for him, but doesn’t do much for you if he comes back from Sturgis and coughs on you.
Apparently, he’s taking a walk on the wild side and dragging you along with him.
Then I read about the search for a vaccine, put the three news events in my mental blender and the above cartoon occurred to me.
Spent the morning drawing it up and just about the time I hit send on the email that would deliver the cartoon to King Features I thought:
“Hmm…maybe it’s kinda stupid to insult motorcycle gangs.”
Unfortunately, that thought occurred to me after I hit send so now I gotta live with it, but figured if I was going to comment about public stupidity I ought to admit I’m often part of that crowd.
If the Hell’s Angels are in attendance, here’s hoping they aren’t big newspaper readers. Either way, I think I’ll stay out of South Dakota for a while.
Those are pro-rated numbers based on comparisons to current population in the US. I only know people that were infected and showed no other signs after recovery. I did hear about one person in good health that did die.
Stop equating cases with deaths. Do you know how many cases there were of the Hong Kong flu? Nobody does. Maybe because the bureaucrats and mainstream media( that includes you)didn’t opportunize the chance to scare the populace out of its sense of liberty and personal responsibility. And people then accepted the reality that people die from all kinds of flus and they survive them and they develop immunities. We only know that this flu in these Misunited States of America has not yet reached the number of HK deaths. Is Jimmy the Greek still alive? I’d like to see the odds of dying from this flu. How do those odds compare with each of the other big killers out there: cancer, starvation, homicide, car accidents, natural disasters.......