"Essential, front-line workers" is 2020-speak for "low-waged, economically precarious workers who risk their lives for us."

To all that, add "workers who are showered with abuse by right-wing anti-mask bullies."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/18/covid-pandemic-store-clerk-north-carolina

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In the @washingtonpost, this anonymous editorial from a 63 year old with asthma who makes $10/h in a dockside convenience store in a 900-person town in North Carolina where the sheriff refuses to enforce the state mask rule because he "doesn't want to be the mask police."

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She describes how she is subjected to physical intimidation, verbal abuse -- and risk of death from coronavirus -- by customers, especially weekenders from Raleigh and Charlotte who ignore the increasingly desperate signs telling people that they can only shop with a mask on.

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These bullies aren't mollified by offers to bring their orders to them outside the store if they want to remain maskless, and certainly not by the offer of a free mask. Instead, they do things like open the door and scream "Fuck masks! Fuck you!" and storm off.

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They tape handbills to the storefront with hoax information about the ADA entitling people to shop without masks, call her an agent of sharia law, or ask whether she's preparing to turn "mind control" on her.

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She describes a life of fear and trauma, where every day at work is a day of abuse and threats, where she and her co-worker sometimes have to lock themselves in the storage room to sob because burly men have screamed at them and threatened them.

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She's resorted to keeping pepper spray behind the till in case she has to fend off a physical assault.

The GOP politicized epidemiology. In some ways, it's baffling, like branding ass-wiping a badge of effete liberalness and spending all day with shit on your underwear.

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On the other hand, it's standard death-cult shit, just a variation on earlier hits like "Smoking is manly and only wimpy bleeding hearts believe it causes cancer." One of the most vivid ways that the GOP gets turkeys to vote for Christmas is pushing the embrace of the lethal.

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Whether that's dismissing the risk of unhealthy food, or guns, or highways without speed limits, or factories without health and safety or pollution curbs, the death cult has a business model.

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The thing that binds all these activities together is that they either make money for a business, or save money for a business. By making the embrace of self-destructive activities a culture war issue, the financiers of the right line their own pockets.

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Of course, the joke's on them. Runaway coronavirus won't just affect $10/h cashiers, and climate change won't skip their beach homes.

eof/