I still wear a mask and it helps me feel safe. But selfish other people refuse to do the same... despite my efforts. Am I in the wrong? BEL MOONEY imagines
Our brilliant advice columnist Bel Mooney has answered thousands of readers’ letters over the years. But what if the rich and famous turned to her for peerless advice about their own problems?
Each week, we invite Bel to look behind the headlines and ponder an imaginary celebrity dilemma that we have made up for her (tongue firmly in cheek). In turn, Bel will take the letter at face value, just as she does with all those that pour into her famous column each week.
She will give an honest answer – so celebrities and politicians, listen up! This week, we imagine what Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's daughter Violet might write in a letter to Bel.
Jennifer Garner and her mask-wearing daughter Violet Affleck out and about in LA in May
Dear Bel,
I’ll cut to the chase. Four years after the vaccine rollout, and a year after the World Health Organisation declared the Covid pandemic over, I’m still wearing a face mask. What’s more, I want others to as well. In fact, I think they should. Frankly, I believe it’ s anti-social and selfish to refuse to wear a mask.
I know people like me often get pitying looks and some are even calling us deluded. Many people have questioned the efficiency of face masks, and the argument has almost become part of the culture wars.
But as someone who caught a post-viral condition in 2019, I’d rather be safe than sorry. I saw first-hand that medicine doesn't always have answers to the consequences of even minor viruses.
A face mask helps me feel safe. People who disagree with me remind me (helpfully) that the pandemic is now over. But they are foolish not to realise that the chances of getting Covid and other viruses still linger.
That’s why I can’t understand why others refuse to wear face masks, particularly in medical settings - where I believe they should do the courtesy of keeping people like me safe. Is it really that much of an imposition?
VIOLET
Bel Mooney replies: Because you are only 18, I feel I should be tolerant and gentle – and yet I find that rather hard.
It’s not just that I disagree with your obsession with face masks, nor the fact that many experts have told us that face masks were pretty useless in containing the spread of Covid. All the facts and figures concerning that are online, so I’m not going to cite them here.
Your obsession worries me because it seems unnatural for a young woman your age to want to cover her face all the time. What are you trying to hide?
But my real issue with you is authoritarianism. Yours, I mean. I question why you think you have the right to tell other people – and in no uncertain terms - what they should and should not do. An 18-year-old is an adult and should be learning to listen to other people as well as expressing her own views. But I’m afraid you come across like a privileged, protected and entitled Hollywood princess.
You want the imposition of 'mask mandates' in medical facilities and call for an end to all 'mask bans' - in a passionate plea to the governing body for Los Angeles County. You say, 'I demand mask availability, air filtration and Far-UVC light in government facilities, including jails and detention centres, and mask mandates in county medical faculties.'
To be fair, many people might feel safer wearing a mask inside a hospital or medical centre. Inside a hospital or medical centre, if told to wear a mask, I would. Yet back in 2020 I was adamant, as a women in her 70s with a history of asthma and bronchitis, that I would wear a mask as little as possible. Believing passionately in the liberty that’s enshrined within the American constitution, I thought back then - as I do now - that lockdown and mask-wearing should be a choice.
Stay home if you like, but don’t lock me up. Wear a mask if you like, but don't make me wear one of the horrible things!
Violet, who is often seen wearing a face mask, shared her experience of contracting 'a post-viral condition' in 2019. Seen with Affleck and stepmother Jennifer Lopez in 2023
You justify your demands by saying, ‘I contracted a post-viral condition in 2019. I'm OK now, but I saw first-hand that medicine does not always have answers to the consequences of even minor viruses.'
So you got ill before Covid, question the ability of medicine to ‘have answers’ – yet believe that masks are the answer? Not logical.
You have also been photographed as recently as last year out and about without a mask. And in these snaps, when you are wearing one, the people around you aren’t. What’s going on?
I have my own deep suspicions, which are actually sympathetic to you. Like many young people (and no, I’m not being patronising) you think you have the answer to all the problems of the world. The trouble is, you have seized on masks as the answer.
You’ve said, that Covid, ‘stands to exacerbate our homelessness crisis, as well as the suffering of many people in our city. It hits communities of colour, disabled people, elderly people, trans people, women and anyone in a public facing essential job the hardest.’
So – as simplistic about this as any cultist or convert – you ‘demand’ masks BY ORDER. Thus, you seem to believe, all the problems you identify will go away and people will be safe.
It’s as unrealistic as unicorns frolicking over the Golden Gate. There is such grief and fear behind all your public statement, which people might not listen to (I’m sorry, but this is true) were you not the daughter of those parents.
Nobody is ever ‘safe’ this side of the grave. Some people might work out (with sadness) that your father’s amours must have been painful and even embarrassing, and that a girl your age wearing a mask in public and making imperious demands on the authorities is doing so ….why? Because she desperately craves attention.
