Please be kind. Wear a mask. It's the law.

     "RBG works less than 5 miles from here. If you won't wear a mask to protect our friends and family, do it to protect RBG."

          Yard sign in DC neighborhood

Social pressure is building to do your part. 

Yard sign

We should not be surprised that there is resistance to wearing a mask. People were slow to adopt wearing seat belts in cars, too. There was lots of evidence they saved lives, but people had excuses. Inconvenient. No value. Maybe it was actually better to be thrown out of the car. 

In 1983, fifteen years after seat belts were common in cars, only 15% of Americans said they used seatbelts consistently. There is still no mandatory seat belt law in New Hampshire, the live free or die state. Getting people to use seat belts has been a fifty year process of changing minds.

The seat belt experience showed Ralph Nader there was "a libertarian streak among resisters" to seat belts. They took the stance that you're not going to tie the American people up in seat belts," he said. "We are a very hard society to change cognitively."

With seat belts, what worked to change behavior was requiring car companies to install them, having persistent buzzers in cars when they weren't deployed, and then making their actual use mandatory and subject to fines.  PSAs, ads, and road signs tried to sell it as a good idea: "Buckle up for safety." 

Now the signs say "Buckle up. It's the law."

Carrots and sticks. There is a one-two approach going on regarding masks. The carrot would be things like this lightheared PSA for urging New Yorkers to use masks:  

Click: 60 seconds, with a surprise ending

Or this one, with shots of New Yorkers wearing masks, doing their part to protect someone else, ending with the tag line, "Hey, New York. It's your turn to be the hero. Wear your mask." Click: 30 seconds

Celebrities help out, posting on social media:

Alecia Silverstone

Here is former Bush Vice President Dick Cheney promoting wearing a mask, in a signal contrary to his brand as a libertarian conservative politician. If even Dick Cheney wears one, then you can. He's no liberal weenie.

Cheney

Humorous cartoons circulate:

                  

Twitter circulates idea on how to deal with objections to mask-wearing:

Oregon Governor Brown has announced an order requiring use of masks in stores. These photos are from the farm/ranch store that this blog has described several times, the one in an agricultural area, with pickup trucks in the parking lot, and as of a week ago, almost zero use of masks by customers. This is Trump country. 

Yesterday mask use was universal inside the store.

An employee staffed the entrance and had surgical masks on hand to give to people if they attempted to enter without a mask. Every employee and customer wore a mask, although several customers wore them carelessly, in the "schnoz" or "feedbag" manner portrayed in the cartoon above.

The signs say "Welcome" and "Please" but the employee was there to enforce the mask rule.

There has been a shift in the message from political leadership, but one so limited that it simultaneously represents opposition to the mask. Yesterday the breaking news was that the president wore a mask when he visited sick people at Walter Reed Hospital. "When you're in a hospital. . . I think it's expected that you wear a mask," Trump said.

OK, wear a mask. At a hospital.

Click: Fox

Resistance persists, with a workaround allowing flagrant non-compliance. The Fox story on Trump was accompanied by two advertisements for "breathable masks." These masks have open weave mesh in front of the mouth, making them useless for the purpose of protecting others. Their purpose is to confound the law by allowing a wearer to assert to a mask monitor that they are, in fact, in compliance with the requirement to wear a mask, while openly defying the mask rule purpose. 

They embed a message: you can have your stupid rule, but you can't make me wear a mask.