Bring an Umbrella…

Come with me, if you will, in this little thought experiment…

Imagine you’re watching the nightly news. The weather man comes on and tells you it’s going to rain tomorrow.

So, before you go to bed for the night, you find your trusy umbrella in the closet and set it next to the front door for in the morning.

You get up, and look, it’s raining. You take your umbrella with you as you leave and you stay dry on your way to the car and to the office and every other place you go while it’s raining.

Or, you get up and it’s actually not raining. Well, you grab your umbrella anyway, just in case in starts raining later. You might even carry it with you, even if it doesn’t ever rain the whole day.

Now, let’s back up. Instead, you’re watching the nightly news and the smiling weather man assures you that it is definitely not going to rain tomorrow. Awesome, right?

But then when you wake up in the morning, it’s pouring down buckets.

Oh, man! What do you do. You’ve got that umbrella in the closet, but the weather man, a trained expert in the weather, told you it wasn’t going to rain. Well, I guess you’ll just ignore the more up-to-date evidence and just run out there in the rain and get all wet, maybe even get sick. After all, the earlier evidence suggested it was not going to rain.

Continued on Page 11 VIEWPOINT (cont.)

Hopefully, you picked up on my little hints here. If not, please allow me to explain.

If you go looking for a news story or some quote from an expert telling you face masks were not needed to fight the coronavirus, you’ll find it. If you do a Google search looking for someone to tell you that you’re better off not getting the COVID-19 vaccine, I can save you the effort.

Those “news” articles are out there.

That’s what’s wrong here.

Whatever you want to believe, believe me, you can find someone who says you’re right.

You know what, many experts were saying masks were not recommended…

like 18 months ago. That’s what the science was saying at that time. It turns out that wearing one actually could keep you from spreading the virus. When the science changed, the information changed.

Now we have a vaccine, but people are refusing to take it based on some misinformation. I get it, it can be confusing. You can find plenty of information about vaccines being bad, but you have got to consider the

Back to my original analogy… who are you going to turst about the weather forecast? A trained meteorologist or your Aunt Bea’s bunions?

Now look out your window. It really is raining and only the stubborn and willfully ignorant aren’t carrying umbrellas. No matter what you might have been told before, no matter how inconvenient it is to carry an umbrella around with you, whether you think it’s raining in your particular neighborhood, carry your umbrella.

It’s actually a special umbrella! Instead of just keeping you dry, it will also keep everyone around you from getting wet! And it works indoors too!

Wear a mask.

Get the shot.