Personally, I think the stores should be doing the enforcement. Mandatory signs out front saying masks must be worn inside, and service refused and you get asked to leave without a mask. If stores are caught (by cops on their coffee/lunch runs) not complying or enforcing, they get fined. Sourcing and wearing a mask/bandana/scarf/etc isn’t difficult or burdensome.
That is how I personally would like to see it happen if the state deemed it neccessary to require masks.
What if nobody in the store is wearing them either?
Edit: This is not a thought experiment. This is what is happening where I live. I took a drive to my favorite beer store on Saturday and I was the only person there with a mask on.
I had eyes on me!
The store gets fined. For each violation. A couple hundred per fine, a couple times per day. Idk any store manager that would be okay with losing that kind of money each day over something do simple.
I feel lucky that most folks in my area took precautions seriously from the beginning which is a big reason my state has been so succesful lowering the infection rate. When I go to the grocery store +90% are wearing masks, when I go for a walk people step off the sidewalk to give room, etc. If these precautions had not been so eagerly adopted voluntarily, I would have been totally fine with the kind of enforcement I mention above.
Interesting. How do you imagine this fine gets levied? What’s the right thing to do, in the case of the fantastic beer store I patronized Saturday?
Should I report them?
Should someone else?
Should we have police check in without a warrant?
Should we create a separate pandemic policy enforcement agency to do exactly that?
Just let it go?
What do you think?
The right thing to do? Probably follow the law… Especially an unburdensome, temporary law meant strictly to protect people from an historic pandemic. As my pops said “let your conscience be your guide”.
No warrant needed to go in a store I believe (though, what about Costco, or club stores like that?). But yeah, you would rely on Karen’s and or cops just checking up. Wouldn’t be tough for patrol officers to hit the major stores a few times per day, and the smaller stores a few times per week. Just looking for stores blatantly in non-compliance.
Why do you think that awesome beer store wouldn’t enforce a mask law?
I can’t speak to anyone’s personal motivations but my own. I can say that there is growing unrest in Maine for a lot of perfectly understandable reasons.
Maine isn’t Washington, we don’t have a place like Seattle and we don’t have anything remotely resembling NYC. What government schmuck are you going to send up to rural Maine to fine some old lady who will tell you right to your face to go fuck yourself?
Looking at the numbers over the last month, moose remain a greater day-to-day threat than COVID-19 does for a good chunk of our state’s northern population, and most of the deaths we have had have been confined to just a couple of facilities. Yet we’ve completely powered down the core of our state’s economy, causing hardship that can’t be calculated. Maybe that’s the right thing to do, but I’d say the jury’s definitely out on that one.
Are you still ready to come down hard on that old lady who just told you to go fuck yourself, and shove that stupid mask up your ass?
Edit: Again, this is not a thought experiment. Nor is it an insult directed at you. It is how people around here talk, and I think it is a fair representation of a lot of behavior you’re going to see.
Our governor is learning this right now.
Funny story (to me anyways), a few years ago near harpswell we were getting pizza and a buddy asked the older lady at the register for ranch dressing…
In the thickest Maine accent she replied “faaaackk yuuuu”. It became a catchphrase amongst our friend group.
I get the unrest in rural areas. And I think many mitigation policies are overkill for many areas. I’m fine with initial overreaction in a pandemic, but I want rollbacks of policies when it becomes clear it was an overreaction.
But, if you’re asking me how I would enforce mask wearing, it would be by fining stores that allow maskless customers.
That may work well for where you live, but on behalf of the VASTLY more numerous economic victims of this virus, I hope like hell Maine stays firmly in the “Fuck You” column instead of becoming a society of mask, distance and sanitizer snitches.
I’ll keep wearing my mask as I have been for a while, because I think it is a sensible precaution that doesn’t cost me anything to take, but I totally get the people who have serious concerns about where our governor is leading us. It looks bad already. Really bad. Summer is cancelled in a state where a lot of people make a living by providing great summer experiences. Who knows what’s next?
We’re already seeing restaurants open up under their own guidelines in defiance of the governor. Most places seem to be trying to do the right thing, as long as the right thing includes having an opportunity to stay in business. I’m pulling for the businesses that are defying the governor’s orders right now. I think most Mainers are. Enough is enough, if we haven’t been good enough, what does good enough look like?
Some seem to see mask avoidance as an edgy act of defiance. Wearing a mask seems sensible to me, all things considered, but I’m also not particularly worried that we’ll have an explosion of cases when what we’ve been doing has been working for over a month now. Our curve has been flat.
Yay, we did it!
No? There’s more, you say?
Maybe I’d be full on East German Secret Police if I lived in Manhattan right now, but I don’t.
I agree. At least on optics, that cop looks unstable. Not the type of person I want enforcing the law.
It has been brought up down thread by @Californiagrown about what to do when the economics don’t make sense. I think it is case by case. I think the best solution sometimes comes from the cops letting it go.
An example in my state was a police pursuit of a stolen vehicle. They did not drop the chase, when the risk was far higher than the reward of catching the criminal. The police drove at high speed through a park and killed two young children. They should not be allowed to be officers. They have demonstrated they lack judgement.
Not I. I see it as not giving the false impression that I’m a Democrat looking to live out my fantasies of being a Democrat of the past:
Just look at that magnificent social distancing and mask safety!
That’s a cheap shot. You can’t give modern Democrats a hard time about being part of a party that’s been on the wrong side of history for most of its history.
Bernie marched with MLK and Biden served as VP to the first black president, while Trump’s initial administration included Sebastian Gorka, Steve Bannon, and still includes Stephen Miller, and Trump was sued for refusing to rent to black tenants by marking their applications with “C”. Bernie and Biden might still be racist and Trump might not be racist (least racist person you’ve ever met), but that is a cheap shot, and a silly one, considering while it may or may not be that the parties “switched”, the ramifications of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 caused the loss of long-held footholds in the South and began a reworking of the parties, to the point that neither party is recognizable today.
You could also look up the official list of prominent white supremacist groups in the United States today, and see which ones of them are left-wing or right-wing, or who they endorsed for president, and draw your own conclusions.
I didn’t mean for my joke to sting that bad. If you want to take it up in another thread I’ll be happy to make a case well beyond 1964.
Let’s stay on topic here.
The point of discrediting an irrelevant cheap shot in this thread is to stay on topic. Giving a thumbs-up comment with a joke perpetuates the post.
Guilty.
Let’s move on.
That’s true, and I apologize. It’s been almost a decade since they had a Klan member in Congress.
That’s not a moral teaching, it could loosely be considered prophetic hyperbole. It is a statement as to the injustice with which Babylon had conducted itself and what was to come in those harsher times. It is not encouraged or condoned here. Just sayin’. Keep in mind that the Psalms are songs, meant to be sung originally.
Been this way for a while, but that point is brought up many other places than here. “Sure we’re the ones those white supremacists have flocked to for a few decades…but don’t forget they were Dems in the past!”
My S/O’s family rents their lake house for a pretty substantial value, with only a couple weeks empty for them to enjoy it. This year it’s looking like they’ll have a lot more time at the lake, but it’s also looking like they’re going to be losing a lot of money to do so. I’m sure you can guess which lake in our state I’m speaking of and what the cost to own said property is like, hence why they rent it more than use it.
The entire summer rental economy seems to have disappeared by governor’s order. No summer camp, either. No Lobster Fest. No Balloon Fest. No Pumpkin Regatta. All of these corny events bring in tons of money and a lot of people count on that yearly windfall that’s been there year-after-year. Someone just shared a compilation of screen shots containing business closure announcement from the last few days. It’s depressing.
I don’t wish hardship on anyone throughout this, but it is coming no matter what I wish. I won’t be surprised if I’m shopping for a lake house in a year or two. I was on the other end of lake property fire sale in the late 2000’s, so I’ve got the necessary karma to benefit from market forces this time around.
