link to original reddit post by /u/PaperbackWriter66

Long story short, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area of California and their mask mandates need to be opposed by every person of good conscience. I refuse to just placidly submit to this nonsense any longer, and everyone should do the same. I have always chafed (literally and figuratively) at the mask mandates, especially as they apply to gyms. I have a long-winded explanation as to why, but: brevity.

Mask mandates issued by the diktat of unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats simply cannot and should not be tolerated by anyone in this country. Not if your chief value is rule of law, not if your chief value is democracy, and not if your chief value is liberty of the individual.

The government has dragooned private business into being the enforcer of its edicts, and we need to oppose this. We need to make life as hard as possible for those businesses and their employees who willingly choose to comply. If we make it easy for this nonsense to be promulgated and enforced, we only encourage it to last longer and for more of it to happen.

Go maskless into stores and businesses, make them throw you out, make them explain what they are doing and why, make them acknowledge that they are foregoing profits, make them look as petty and irrational as possible, becuase ultimately: that is what they are. This is no longer about saving lives or keeping people safe, this is all an exercise in forcing us to comply and submit to arbitrary authority, and we must all have the courage of our convictions to stand up and say "No."

At best, these mandates are a misguided effort aimed at a crisis which has already passed, and that too makes it worthy of standing against it.

Make these lily-livered, submissive, sniveling, groveling, thoughtless servants of the State say outloud what they have refused to think about, and do it in public so bystanders can see that some of us have the courage to stand up to this baseless bullying from unelected bureaucrats.

Backstory:

In June, the mask requirements here were relaxed. In July/early-August, they were re-imposed, even on the fully vaccinated, by the stroke of a pen. Ya get that? A single, un-elected, government bureaucrat that hardly anyone even knows exists issues an order and at the drop of a hat, everyone is back in masks, as if the 4 week period when people were wearing a mask if they chose to (and everything was fine) had never existed. Of course, we've always been at war with East Asia. Anyway....

The day after this order was handed down from On High, I went to the gym maskless and was confronted by an employee about it. I quit my membership later that day after an email exchange with the owner said that he wanted people to wear masks, mandate or no. Read more here.

Today, I quit another membership at a different gym. I hadn't been there in a while, in fact I'd even forgotten I had a membership there. I went in and had a look around; the staff were wearing masks but the patrons were all wearing masks below their chins or noses (or, at most, wearing them properly when walking around but yanking them down when doing a set).

I spoke to the manager of this place, and I asked what their mask policy was. She said that they follow all rules and laws, which aroused my ire. The conversation had a few more twists and turns (which I can get into if you want more snippets), but the climax was this:

“You know, I was just in your gym," I said to the manager, "and I saw that most people are going around with masks below their noses or completely down below their chin. And, ya know, if you go on the County’s website, they tell us that in our county about 75% of people are vaccinated. I am vaccinated. So what good do you think you are doing here with your mask policy?”

“What do you mean?”---the confusion in her voice was palpable. I don’t think she had ever thought about this for a single second before now.

“Like, rules don’t exist for the sake of having rules. They’re supposed to accomplish something. You don’t follow rules just for the sake of following rules do you?”

“Yes, we do. We do follow rules just for the sake of following rules.”

These are the people that rule you. Don't let them. Our country is turning into a country of willing serfs, and we need to stand against it.