Help, please, with offering a way out of our collective predicament at all societal levels, from church congregations through school districts, fire departments and as county, state and national communities.

Everywhere there is a downward spiral as righteous rhetoric grows ever more strident against getting coronavirus vaccinations and the forced necessity to again wear masks in public. This segment of our citizenry continues to insist on pressing their personal and global views on the larger community.

This editorial is defending, not attacking, our public health departments and the local, state and federal governments that have strove daily for 18 months of hard work to keep the entire population safe. At the national level, that is over 330 million people. In Skagit County it is about 130,000 people. For the La Conner school district, it is almost 600 students and perhaps 100 staff plus all associated families.

At the beginning of the summer the hope was there would be no more coronavirus editorials because we, the people, were seeking to end the pandemic in our households and thus the general public. That was a hopeless hope. An earlier assessment, that we are not halfway through this, and the reason past editorials had repeated references to the three year flu pandemic of 1918-1921 was, sadly, more accurate.

There is a fundamental difference when the director of the National Center for Disease Control, a medical doctor, says the solution for all of us is vaccination and, when mixing with the unvaccinated, to wear masks and distance socially and when state governors eying the Republican presidential nomination preach what they call common sense individual responsibility. The doctor is stressing public health guidelines. The governors are going for political advantage. Their calculations are ideological and the only facts counted are potential votes.

Too many of our neighbors are like their Texas tribal members. In that state, a seemingly joyous righteous extremism bubbles up from a mix of religious and political fundamentalist ideology. For that population, faith will always trump all the facts on the ground, as generals say assessing war damage.

Our neighbors demand to be free to meet unmasked with fellow tribal members, but they cannot be trusted to mask up in public. Their distrust of their local public health professionals requires us to not trust them. The unmaskers can put their children at risk but in doing so they put ours, and the rest of us.

The unmaskers have already bent public health policies to the detriment of society. Our economic health is now endangered. The healthcare system is strained to the breaking point. It seems, to some, that nurses, doctors and teachers are no longer heroes but impediments to political purity.

The unmasked do have the freedom to get sick. Public health and political leaders need the support of the public so policies and actions are in place to keep the community in every public space, from hospitals to classrooms to stores and restaurants, free from these insistent, unsympathetic, increasingly unhealthy people.

Unvaccinated people threaten both the health and the economic livelihood of the community, of adults and children and hospitals, schools, museums, stores and restaurants. All social and economic restrictions will dissolve when everyone who can get vaccinated gets vaccinated.

The aggressive unmaskers are no more right to insist on unmasked students than they are to shout fire in crowded theaters. They claim to call balls and strikes but in this dance of life and death, they are using the wrong language and playing by the wrong rules.

Anyone with suggestions for assisting unmaskers to join the larger community to increase our public and economic health, please share them for publication in the Weekly News.