It’s hard to believe that this is still really a thing, but the struggle over wearing a mask for the common good only proves that good is no longer all that common.

And it’s not even novel.

This viral culture war has brewed since the last pandemic, when the Spanish flu (that began in Kansas) shuttered schools and businesses, outlawed public gatherings and left loved ones isolated in quarantine camps to die. The Red Cross took out newspaper ads and handed out gauze for citizens to make their own face coverings for protection.

Americans reeling from World War I were implored to see it as their civic duty.

“The man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker,” declared the American Red Cross, as some local communities imposed 10 days in jail and fines from $5 to $200, back when that was real money.

Some places in America today are settings, though unadjusted for inflation.

These weren’t far-away matters. The Michigan Health Lab noted in a blog last year:

“Workers complained that masks were too uncomfortable to wear all day. One Denver salesperson refused because she said her ‘nose went to sleep’ every time she put one on. Another said she believed that ‘an authority higher than the Denver Department of Health was looking after her well-being.’ As one local newspaper put it, the order to wear masks ‘was almost totally ignored by the people; in fact, the order was cause of mirth.’ The rule was amended to apply only to streetcar conductors – who then threatened to strike. A walkout was averted when the city watered down the order yet again. Denver endured the remainder of the epidemic without any measures protecting public health.”

Sleeping noses aside, the issue reached an apex Sunday, I hope, when the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office issued a press release to say  it was stepping up security at schools this week  because of “tensions” over mask rules. That’s a true story.

Eagle County Public Health and local schools made the call with the best information they had, and if I’m choosing sides, I’m with them.

Schools are being asked to tolerate behavior from parents they would never tolerate from a student. In Texas on Tuesday, a parent grabbed at a teacher’s mask, the same day noted school-mask naysayer Greg Abbott, the governor, announced he had tested positive.

I get it: Nobody likes being told what to do or what’s good for them. The more you push, the more they’ll pull back, no matter how far over the cliff it drives them.

What follows is a true story from the early 1970s. Outside the town where I grew up, there was a old guy named Ezra “Ez” Gilley. Ez thought it was nobody’s business which direction he fired his gun on his property, if he had a good line on a deer or a turkey in his yard. Ez was a good shot, so he thought.

One day, Ez killed the engine in his truck with a 3-inch shell of double-ought buckshot.

All due respect to Bobby McGee, but freedom’s just another word for walking to the store.

Ez couldn’t just try to get along with the natural world around him, meaning his neighbors and animals grazing by the propane tank. Ez had many demons but only one truck. He made his choices.

We’re all just trying to make it through this thing.

The Eagle County School District is just trying to put on five days of in-person teaching each week.

“This should prevent the need for prolonged quarantines or transitions to remote learning because of disease spread,” the Sheriff’s Department explained.

Superintendent Philip Qualman said could only do the best he could, as cases in the county rise again and children increasingly are victims.

“Unfortunately, here we are,” he said. “As has been the case since the beginning of the pandemic, this disease does not care about our schedules or when school starts.”

Parents can enroll their kids in online school, if they don’t want to mask up. That’ a compromise, but it also feels like giving Ez Gilley a slingshot. 

As the law in the Colorado high country was warning of tensions over masks and others were pushing and shoving in Texas, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told Fox News’ truth-teller Chris Wallace that the country was also ablaze in an “epidemic of misinformation,” and he offered a stark warning for what it says about the next 100 years in the United States.

“It’s devastating that we in this country, the most advanced technological society on the planet, has somehow slipped into a space where the evidence and the basis for making decisions on facts has gotten pushed aside by politics, by social media conspiracies, and by this incredible depth of anger and grievance that seems to be held by so many,” he said.

“Our future as a nation has got to revolve around coming away from that kind of approach to everything or I don’t see how we’re going to solve all of our society’s problems, which are looming in front of us.”

He called unvaccinated people “sitting ducks.”

Somewhere Ez Gilley is looking on.