A RESPONSE TO THE LLANO REPUBLICAN PARTY'S RESOLUTION TO REBUKE THE GOVERNOR


 (This was published as an Op-Ed in The Highlander, a newspaper distributed throughout the Highland Lakes region of Texas)

By Dana Rushing (former Llano County Democratic Party Chair, the current VP of Highland Lakes Democratic Women, and Senate District 24 Committee Woman to the State Democratic Executive Committee)

The Texas Democratic Party's core values address the belief in equal opportunity, fairness, freedom, family, community, and a responsibility to ourselves and each other. Our most vital view is that people come first. We are a party for and by the people.  

The Governor of Texas recently made masks mandatory in public and took other measures to ensure our citizens' safety. If anything, there should have been a mandate months ago. The state opened too early, and COVID-19 ran rampant throughout our state, making our state one of the worst for the country's number of cases and deaths. Our hospitals are full, and people die every day from the virus. Many people felt that wearing masks and limiting gatherings in public was against their rights as citizens of the United States. After all, they reasoned, they should be free to do as they please. We can all now see the disaster of such behavior.

Theories that COVID-19 is nothing worse than the flu have been posted on various social media pages. Your contributor to The Highlander, Connie Swinney, recently posted on Facebook that a "healthcare worker" had sent her information concerning the possibility that oxygen levels are reduced when wearing a mask, resulting in death. 

I started my 50-year career in healthcare as an aide in a psychiatric hospital. I earned three degrees through hard work while working my way up the proverbial ladder. I retired four years ago after running a rehabilitation hospital and many outpatient physical therapy clinics. I never knew one person who became weak or died from wearing masks. This kind of false information, distributed freely throughout social media, needs to cease.

Setting politics and conspiracy theories aside, science has revealed that wearing masks will prevent the spread of the deadly virus COVID-19. Science has also confirmed that COVID-19 is more virulent and dangerous than the flu. I know six individuals who had COVID-19, and one died from it.   

When significant numbers of people refuse to wear masks and insist on gathering in large groups, not social distancing, COVID-19 will continue to spread. It's my constitutional right to be free from harm. Your freedom to not wear a mask infringes on my right not to be exposed to the virus that you may unknowingly spread.

If everyone complies with wearing a mask, we can help stop the spread of COVID-19. Not only will lives be saved, but our economy can begin to recover. Isn't this what all of us want?  

Winston Churchill once said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after trying everything else." 

Let's do the right thing and care for ourselves and each other.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DR MCELROY AND TEXAS A&M

Image
  I’ve lived my life with integrity, compassion, and honesty.  I don’t back down from a controversial subject and will always speak out against injustice and prejudice.  I received many benefits from being White, although I was still short-shafted regarding equal pay as a woman.   Case in point: I was replaced by two men when I retired from overseeing a 36-bed rehabilitation hospital and 6 outpatient clinics serving children through adults. The man who replaced me had great difficulty managing the inpatient rehabilitation services. Hence, the Healthcare System overseeing the services promoted a male physical therapist to manage the outpatient facilities.  Each of the men was paid more than I.  It’s probably not a stretch to guess that had I been a person of color with the same credentials, I would not have been hired, and doubly so if I had been a woman of color with the same credentials.   A tenured UT journalism professor was recently recruited to Texas A&M to kick-start their jo
Read more

MY LIFE WITH TERI FLANAGAN

Image
  (Teri authored a story about me entitled "My Life with Dana Rushing" in the local newspaper after I moved from Horseshoe Bay to Austin. It was a total surprise and touched me beyond words. She is now in hospice at a facility in Marble Falls. Teri's husband has given me permission to publish this story. It will be in The Beacon this week.) I’m incredibly fortunate to have a friend I could call to assist me with the various projects I began or coordinated while living in Horseshoe Bay for five years. Other friends also answered my call to action, but Teri was always the first one I contacted because I was confident she would agree to help. Teri once said when she saw my name on her caller ID, she knew I wasn’t calling to chat and that she was being recruited for another project. Still, Teri answered my call. Teri is a talented artist and an avid reader. Her beautiful painting of a colorful donkey hangs in my home. A burnt orange wooden walking stick David made helps k
Read more

ROSA PARKS AND THE DREAM

Image
I dreamed of Rosa Parks last night.  She was sitting in a seat in the middle of a bus with Black men sitting on both sides of her.  I figured they were bodyguards and had joined her after news got out that this 'uppity Black woman' had dared to take her place amongst the Whites. The days of sitting in the back of the bus were over for her.  She worked long, hard days at low wages for a white family and had to take a bus every...damn...day.  Her great-grandparents had been slaves.  Enough was enough.   She felt she earned something more than a seat at the back of the bus.   She didn't know that this small act would set up a firestorm of millions of people being emboldened by her.  More and more people began speaking out, demonstrating, and even rioting to bring civil rights to the forefront.  The battle continued until, at last, civil rights passed.  Racism became somewhat more subtle over 50 years. But the Rosa Parks I saw in my dreams is still in that seat.
Read more