In this age of advanced science, a debate over….face masks?

By Joe Rothstein

One of the byproducts of gross mismanagement of the pandemic by Trump and others in authority has been a national debate over science, a debate, improbably, over whether we should be wearing masks to fight the coronavirus. Who would have thought such a simple act, such a personal act, would be fraught with political consequences?

This always has puzzled me about climate change as well. Why the political intensity of those who oppose measures to limit carbon pollution? Why do so many believe that climate change is a conspiracy entered into by thousands of scientists and politicians? A vast conspiracy that not one conspirator is willing to admit exists. In all of human history there’s never been a conspiracy as successful at keeping its secrets.

For a while, the consequences of climate change seemed too far beyond the horizon to generate much concern. But to hold such views in the face of historic heat waves, droughts, climate-forced migrations and other clear evidence?

And now, here we are with another undeniable reality, another scientific consensus, and another, literally fight-to-the-death opposition to the least political of objects: a face mask. As with climate change, this is hardly the place to plant the flag of civil liberties. Not wearing masks, not safe distancing, not hand washing regularly — -all of it puts everyone else at risk of serious illness and death.

A civil libertarian dispute worth fighting is the one on the nation’s southern border. The government is taking away private land to build a wall, and many of those land…