Thanks to the community minded businesses, people

I want to thank Home Depot for insisting on their employees wear masks to protect themselves and their shoppers. (Home Depot discovered at one of their stores that five employees had COVID-19 so they acted.) I feel better and safer in my favorite store. I know wearing a mask for an eight-hour shift is hard. But they are helping themselves and all of us. God bless them.

Likewise, the management of Target and Walmart are now insisting that everyone who comes into their stores, not just employees, wear masks. Again we are most grateful as our son works at a Walmart in another state and he tells some sad stories.

I think Yoke’s also insists on their employees wearing masks. Kudos to them and to a small shop like Jake’s Chimney Sweep whose employee wore a mask in our house a few weeks ago when he serviced some equipment.

We have a president who has politicized wearing masks in order to get re-elected and there are plenty of let’s call them “non-science majors” and conspiratorial thinkers, and just selfish people. Nothing to be done about them. The rest of us need to encourage people and employees to wear masks and to pray.

Idolizers of Trump think the pandemic is not real nor will it touch them. Tell that to the family of 37-year-old man in Ohio who refused to wear an [expletive] mask, calling it all “hype,” who was infected on July 1 and died on July 4. Tell that to the people sick and dying, for instance in Florida today and all the other states who didn’t believe the virus is real and that masks help. Google the Wall Street Journal and the article titled, “Face masks really do matter.”

STEPHEN DRINKARD

Sandpoint