I’m sure most of you have seen the infamous CBS story about South Dakota’s Covid cases spiking, in which a nurse serving in a Covid unit in Sioux Falls was about to walk into Tommy Jacks bar downtown Sioux Falls without a mask until the reporter talked her out of it.
But one of the strangest moments in the interview was when Mayor TenHaken said the reason people in South Dakota don’t want to wear masks is because of the ‘cowboy mentality’. Besides the fact a Dutch Evangelical from Worthington, Minnesota would know very little about ‘cowboy mentality’ I question how many cowboys we really have in South Dakota anymore, besides a handful in the Western part of the state.
Making a moronic (and kind of romantic) statement seems par for the course from Paul since this pandemic started. You know, like, ‘I didn’t sign up for this.’ And ‘I’m tired of it.’ So when he wanted to blame cattle ranchers for why people don’t wear masks, it didn’t surprise me. Next he will tell us the reason employers pay low wages here is because South Dakotans like to work for nothing (I’m starting to think they do).
So why do I think people don’t want to wear masks? The number one reason is because Noem, Trump and Right Wing Nutty radio told them they don’t have to. I also think most South Dakotans are ignorant of science. So ignorant, it seems they almost have a disdain for it. It’s easy to fear the unknown, and South Dakotans have ironically made a ‘science’ of it. I also think there is a lot of passive aggressive selfishness. The economy and low pay doesn’t help much either since most people live paycheck to paycheck, they don’t have a choice but to show up to work, with a mask or not. I have even witnessed people who got over Covid and didn’t have symptoms anymore return to work within a day of climbing out of bed. Yeah, a real genius move. I guess we are trying to create a herd immunity workforce. Funny, cowboys like herds.
And let’s clear up all the horse manure being spread by the supposed Constitutional scholars that have been showing up to council meetings and farting their Trumpy fartness on Facebook. Your civil rights are not being infringed upon by a private business asking you to wear a mask on their private property. It’s no different than your Grammy asking you to wipe your feet before coming into her house. Put that in your pipe and smoke it John George Jefferson Franklin.
As usual, it seems TenHaken is trying to point fingers at some mysterious phenomenon, this time called ‘cowboy mentality’ when in reality, as a leader, he should just ‘pony up’ and help inform people that not only is Rush, Trump and Noem wrong, that it is time we all ‘wear a dang mask’ whether you are shopping or wrangling cattle.
Covid seems to be sucking a lot of brain cells out of our state, that is, what’s left.