With the health and safety of Dunwoody citizens and visitors in mind, Dunwoody’s Mayor and City Council voted on Monday to approve BOTH a resolution encouraging mask-wearing and an ordinance mandating masks in public and commercial spaces, with exceptions.
Two days later, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp updated his executive order. While strongly encouraging mask-wearing, the order now includes language specifically suspending any local orders that mandate mask-wearing.
Thus, the City of Dunwoody stands by its resolution that masks and face coverings should be worn to the maximum extent practicable, including inside commercial locations, building spaces open to the public and outdoors when it is not feasible to maintain social distancing of at least six feet. Here is a link to the resolution, which passed unanimously.
If safety is the only thing that matters to you during this pandemic, then taking any risk is unacceptable. But others may feel differently and who is to say that your response is the only valid one? If risk is acceptable for providing what is termed "essential" services, services that you as a politician are not providing, and those "essential" services are placing mostly persons of color at risk (witness the disproportionate percentage of Hispanics/Latinos among the COVID-19 cases currently in our hospitals), then your personal safety may matter to you but you are willing to sacrifice other lives so that you may sit, broadcasting the importance of your position, in front of a wall of toilet paper.
ReplyDeleteHowever, other values are important and some risk is acceptable. Protesting for equality seems to be an acceptable risk to many. Reopening schools? Completely unacceptable! Attending the funeral of a family friend would seem acceptable to me, but no, politicians deem that an unacceptable risk to public safety. I would prefer to be the one weighing acceptable risks based on my values, but I'm not allowed the freedom to make calculations based on my own code of conduct. Instead, I must be force fed my judgments.
We may share some of the same values, but we weigh them differently. Unfortunately, you have your thumb on my scale.