It is  Beckyjack's Food Shack in Hernando County, Florida. This joint not only doesn't require "masks" to enter or be served, it doesn't dignify them. There is a big sign in front that reads: Face Diapers Not Required! Everyone Welcome.

Imagine that.

It is a big step in the right direction to leave it up to individuals to decide whether to wear a "mask" rather than force everyone to wear one, as in the "case" of a local bakery known to me that has a sign informing customers that they will not be asked about "masks" and are free to wear one if they want to and free to not wear one if they want to.

Imagine that.

One size does not and should not fit all, except when it comes to prison cells, perhaps – and that is what America is becoming, right down to the ugly prison terminology ("lockdowns" used to be for convicts, not the unconvicted) and the meant-to-humiliate stand here/walk there/behind the plexiglass barrier kabuki.

People who want to wear a "mask" have the same right to do so that neurotics have always enjoyed. Wear a halved watermelon over your head, if it makes you feel better. Nothing has changed in that respect. Tolerance – even of aberrance so long as harmless – is what made America a different kind of place, once.

What has changed is that the neurotic have been emboldened to regard their psychiatric affliction as normal and now insist that everyone else share it – or at least look as though they do. This has changed America into a different kind of place. An ugly, fearful, eyes-averted kind of place. A place where normal human interaction has been painted as pathological by the pathological.

This tears the formerly-in-effect obligation to be tolerant of neurotic people, tacitly understood by those not so afflicted, for the sake of pity and civility. It was bad form to make fun of a hypochondriac  . . . before hypochondria was weaponized and turned against the healthy.

Before that happened, psychologically normal people knew that afflicted people were afflicted – in need of therapy and compassion, not ridicule. On the same basis that one refrained from making fat jokes in the presence of the fat.