As Nixa, Missouri, recalls its mayor over mask mandate, COVID-19 isn’t a huge worry
On the drive here from Kansas City, I took in a whole conservative radio chorus of coronavirus misinformation. Natural immunity offers better protection than vaccination, said Rush Limbaugh replacements Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, which is exactly backward. You should get vaccinated if you’re over 65, they said, but don’t need to if you’re young. Which again, with serious COVID-19 cases on the rise in younger adults, is just not true.
I don’t know how it could be “conservative” to say, as a Newsmax host did, that “vaccination, in a weird way, is generally just kind of going against nature.” Yes, just like penicillin and indoor plumbing. But I do know that the current wave of this pandemic, which is filling hospitals and exhausting health care workers in the very Republican and largely unvaccinated Ozarks, has in no way been mitigated by Laura Ingraham’s guest who said no one under 30 should be vaccinated, or Charlie Kirk’s comment calling vaccination requirements for college students an “apartheid-style, open-air hostage situation.”
The endless comparisons to Nazi Germany and Communist China really only show how little we know or care about Nazi Germany and Communist China. And when the “pro-life” crowd at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference applauded the news that we aren’t meeting our vaccination goals, even as 95.5% of COVID deaths are among the unvaccinated, well, what is that but the dutiful depravity of the kind of mob that Shirley Jackson conjured in her 1948 short story, “The Lottery”?
Hospitalizations, delta spike near Springfield
So much of our politics is animated by resentment over the cultural condescension of the “elites.” Which is as real as COVID, and no more helpful than your average Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet. But when you cheer for death, well, people are going to call you a death cult.
I’m in Nixa — which calls itself the “master bedroom community” of nearby Springfield — because even amid the spike in hospitalizations and dominance of the delta variant, there’s a move on to recall Mayor Brian Steele over the mask mandate he imposed last year.
A computer consultant who loves his hometown — “Oh, Nixa’s wonderful!” — and ran for mayor because “it’s nice to be able to do something for your neighbors,” Steele is low-key about even the death threats that this recall effort has inspired. There have only been two or three, he stresses, though OK, that is “more than the zero I had in the previous seven years.”
This is a man so measured that, as former Nixa City Council member Jimmy Ledbetter says, “he’d probably debate getting a cheeseburger over a hamburger.”
When local health officials begged him to issue a mask mandate last October, he did. Even though under different circumstances, in July, the City Council had voted against a mandate. “He made a call and saved some lives,” Ledbetter said in an interview.
It just wasn’t done correctly, says Ron Sanders, one of the organizers of the recall effort that will be on the ballot in November. He’d never talked to a reporter before, he told me at Monday night’s City Council meeting. And I’m glad he did talk to me, because he helped me see the situation from his perspective, even though our COVID and other views differ quite a bit.
“It has to do with doing things the right way, and disrespecting citizens’ rights.” Process does matter, and did I mention how many of our divides stem from a lack of respect? Which is, yes, constantly magnified by conservative media.
A question of respect, ‘not about the mask’
I can’t see Steele disrespecting anyone; after Sanders complained on Monday night about how “chilling” to free speech it was to have to announce his address before speaking, Steele immediately instructed his staff to stop requiring that disclosure.
Yet it wasn’t out of nowhere that Sanders mentioned the words “respect” and “disrespect” over and over. His first visit to a City Council meeting was last summer, when he came to talk about what he saw as unfair parking restrictions for truckers, which is what he did for work for seven years. “I didn’t like the stigma truck drivers have in small towns.”
The recall is “not about the mask” itself, he said, but about the feeling that the little guy is being disregarded even “at the lowest level of government.”
“It has nothing to do with politics” he said, and “has nothing to do with left or right.”
I see on social media, especially through what Sanders posts in a Facebook group called “Nixa Neighbors for Unoffendables,” that this doesn’t mean that he himself is not political. He thinks highly of Donald Trump, loved a meme that referred to Bill Clinton as a pedophile, and shared a video that called Tony Fauci a traitor.
Which is not to say that what’s behind his perception of disrespect isn’t bigger than politics. Or that it’s any surprise, given the anti-vaccine IEDs being seeded by the far right, that 93% of Democrats say they’ve been vaccinated or will be, compared to just 49% of Republicans.
What I wish I knew is how we can ever get out of this endless loop of Olympic-level umbrage and self-sabotage. How do we show that we do respect Sanders as a fellow human being — and see his willingness to fight City Hall as something noble and necessary in a democracy — while also disputing some of his claims, like that because he’s had COVID-19 already, “my body knows how to deal with it.”
When I asked folks I stopped on the street in Nixa what they thought about all things COVID, not all of them were true to their demographic group. Warren McDonald, a retired radio announcer and ex-Marine, said most of his friends aren’t vaccinated, but he is. “I don’t like the government telling me what to do, either, but I also don’t want to be sick, and it does provide protection; how stupid do you want to get?”
‘I wish Trump would get more credit’
“I wish Trump would get more credit for it,” said a vaccinated maintenance technician, Andrew Swope. I wish he would, too, if that’s what it would take to motivate more Trump voters to help end this pandemic.
Meanwhile, however, there is a toxic amount of twaddle on the street: “I know so many people who haven’t been vaccinated and they’re fine,” so why bother, said a 21-year-old who has a job delivering pizza. After all, “the Black Plague happened,” and we made it through that.
“At first I was so worried, wearing a mask and washing everything,” said a 20-year-old day care worker, “and now I’m like, ‘You have COVID? Hold my baby.’ ’’
It’s out of respect that I’m not printing her name; what 20-year-old needs that in Google for the rest of all time? But no, I don’t respect the position of those who’d rather have their lungs turn to Styrofoam than take direction from the scientists and “elites” that apparently include even that nice Brian Steele.
I see this more as stubbornness than stupidity. But the more vaccine naysayers prove they’d rather stop breathing than acknowledge that the virus is their enemy and Tony Fauci is not, the more they are making absolutely sure that they will be looked down on.
This story was originally published July 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
