On Sunday, about thirty people gathered in a small mid-town park in Petaluma to stage a political protest march. They were protesting against a Black Lives Matter protest against the firing of Black teachers by a local high school. Many of the protest protestors were waving American flags and “Back the Blue” signs and chatting face to face.

Most of them were not wearing face masks.

I took a few photos. Why? Because I am trying to understand why it is now a badge of honor in some social circles to not wear a mask in public places. The day before the protest of the protest, I was buying a tool at a ranching supply store on Lakeville Street when a woman and two children flowed through the doors, only to be verbally stopped in place by the sales clerk.

She informed the customers that they had to don masks to enter the store. The woman exclaimed that her family is “medically exempt” and do not need to wear masks. The clerk sighed as the woman moved briskly towards us sans mask. I jumped into the conversation.

“Excuse me, Ma-am, but there is no such thing as a medical exemption that allows for you to not wear a face-covering in a store.”

She insisted that she and her children are “medically exempt” and that privacy laws do not allow her to explain why and it is none of my business.

I raised the stakes, saying “Shall we video this conversation? maybe it can go viral.”

She donned a mask and went shopping.

The clerk told me, “My son has really bad asthma and he has to wear a mask!” We shared a comradely moment of Covid-19 fatigue and parted.

Covid-19 is a truly nasty disease with life-long lasting debilitating effects if it does not kill you outright, painfully, and in isolation. The invisibly spreading malady does not respect age, gender, class, caste, or nationality. It has brought the world to its knees and the end is not in sight. The good news is that the spread of the dread disease can be prevented by wearing a cloth mask indoors, and by physical distancing outdoors, and by not breathing on other people, or sucking in air laced with spikey-deadly nano devils.

But to be successful, masking and distancing have to be widely practiced. Sadly, the health of 300 million Americans is at risk because hordes of mask-resisting true believers in lies promoted by ultra-reactionary media and insane politicians consider Covid-19 to be a hoax, a liberal scheme to weaken Trump’s authoritarianism, a Jewish or Antifa or Black Lives Matter plot. Wearing a mask is in their hormonally convoluted minds an assault on individual “freedom” – an illegal abrogation of their supposed right to freely infect other people.

When challenged to wear masks appropriately, many resort to the false claim that they are medically exempt. There is even a bogus “US Department of Justice” certificate of exemption you can download and flash as “proof” of your special legal status as a virus-spreader.

In reality, there is no federal law containing a medical exemption for masks, although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises physicians to tell persons suffering from facial deformities or severe respiratory and heart problems that they do not have to wear masks. Although, they should then shelter in place, so that they do not infect others.

In short, there is no such thing as a law or order providing for a medical exemption that allows for the infection of others, nor should there be. Let’s look at the Covid-19 orders.

Under an order issued by the California Department of Public Health, people older than two years of age must wear face masks indoors when they are around those with whom they do not reside. They must wear them outdoors when closer than six feet to other persons.

There is an exemption for, “Persons with a medical condition, mental health condition, or disability that prevents wearing a face covering. This includes persons with a medical condition for whom wearing a face covering could obstruct breathing or who are unconscious, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to remove a face covering without assistance.”

Those persons are asked to shelter in place or to wear a plastic face shield if they must be in contact with others. They are not allowed to go shopping without a face mask or shield.

Sonoma County’s health order explains why mask wearing is compulsory, “Persons have been shown to be infectious up to 48 hours before onset of symptoms, and as many as 50% of infections seem to occur from asymptomatic persons. All persons who contract COVID-19, regardless of their level of symptoms (none, mild, or severe), may place other vulnerable members of the public at significant risk.”

The Sonoma County order warns, “The violation of any provision of this Order constitutes a threat and menace to public health, constitutes a public nuisance, and is punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.” Those unmasked folks walking around with All Lives Matter signs might want to consider the implications of their defiance of the laws and the social good.

A month ago, there was hope in the North Bay that public gatherings could re-open this summer; yet things are looking bleak for many venues and businesses that rely on socializing as the summer moves into August with restrictions on hosting events still in place to stop the spread of Covid-19.

Five months into the shutdown, movie houses in Sonoma County and elsewhere in the North Bay are especially feeling the effects financially. As the film industry continues to push back opening release dates for major films like Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, local theaters are joining a national movement to call upon Congress to “Save Your Cinema.”

The online campaign is asking for the public’s help to urge Congress to keep movie theaters alive until they can fully reopen. Specifically, the “Save Your Cinema” campaign is gathering letters from the public demanding that Congress support the RESTART Act, which will provide seven-year loans covering six months of
expenses for theaters, and to press the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to implement more relief measures for cinemas of all sizes.

“The moviegoing experience is at the heart of everything we do as we work with lawmakers and film distributors to protect, innovate, and improve the movie theater experience for audiences everywhere,” the National Association of Theatre Owners, who represent theaters in all 50 states, writes on the “Save Your Cinema” website.

Local theaters participating in the campaign includes Sebastopol’s popular Rialto Cinemas, which recently celebrated its 20th year of screening films in the North Bay. Located adjacent to Sebastopol’s Barlow Center near downtown, Rialto Cinemas has established itself as an anchor of the community, bringing world-class films to West Sonoma County, and updating its accommodations to include a full kitchen, beer and wine service and other modern comforts.

Now, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing shelter-in-place orders in Sonoma County, Rialto Cinemas fears not only for its own survival, but for the survival of the entire industry.

In a recent release, Rialto Cinemas writes that, “We closed for the sake of public health and are abiding by strict safety restrictions and guidelines as we plan our reopening. But even when we are able to reopen, it will be very difficult to sustain our business with limited capacity. We need more relief so that we can survive this crisis.”

Without the relief offered by the RESTART Act and the loans that come with it, Rialto Cinemas and other local theaters fear that they will be forced to permanently close their doors. To take action and join the letter-writing campaign, visit SaveYourCinema.com.

Sonoma International Film Festival Opens Virtual Program

Last March, the Sonoma International Film Festival became one of the first North Bay events to cancel in the wake of a shelter-in-place order that made social gatherings impossible.

Now, the festival is turning to the Internet to turn it’s globe-trotting party into an online affair for the SIFF 2.0 Virtual Film Festival, running Thursday, July 30, through Sunday, August 2.

The online event features over a hundred films streaming over the weekend, running the gamut from documentaries to short films, and representing 26 countries.

SIFF is also hoping to include socially distant offerings and plans to host up to 16 select film screenings at various outdoor venues, including local drive-ins. All in-place health orders and guidelines including social distancing, face coverings and hygiene requirements will be implemented.

Other highlights of the virtual festival include a showcase of student films from the Sonoma Valley High School media arts program, a program of short films by women filmmakers presented by the traveling Lunafest, video conversations with filmmakers, and more.

Those who purchased tickets and passes to last March’s planned SIFF will have access to the virtual festival, and anyone can purchase streaming access per film, based on availability, or through a SIFF 2.0 Virtual Pass available at SonomaFilmFest.org.

The inevitability of death has always been a source of dread and anxiety, across all ages and human societies. But the modern age has produced a new, very particular dimension to that primal fear.

Many of us fear not so much death itself, but rather the chaotic, disorienting and often extremely expensive process of dying made common by modern medicine.

But if dying is still inevitable, a messy and inhumane death it does not have to be. That’s the message behind journalist Katy Butler’s recent book The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life (Scribner).

Butler, who discusses the book online in a virtual event hosted by Napa Bookmine and the Yountville Community Center on Friday, July 31, has crossed this terrain before. Her 2013 book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death was part memoir and part investigation, offering the story of her father’s death as an illustration of what she calls “the Gray Zone,” the suspended state between an active life and clinical death largely created by modern medical technology.

“I felt I had laid out a problem in the first book,” says Butler, a long-time Bay Area reporter and writer. “I felt there was a need for a book that was about solutions, and that’s really the difference—this book says, OK, granted we have a broken medical system that is very fragmented toward the end of life, and we are afraid of death anyway. So given these problems, here are the workarounds—stories of people who have actually risen to the occasion and trusted their own best instincts to create a death that was less bad, or maybe even really good.”

The Art of Dying Well works best as a kind of handbook. Its seven chapters are determined by the particular stages of life, from “Resilience,” when you’re still active and healthy, all the way to “Active Dying,” the moment when it’s time to say goodbye. Along the way, each chapter outlines the attitudes and methods of preparation that can lead to a dignified and emotionally fulfilling end of life. The book’s format, says Butler, allows readers to return to it at different times in their lives.

“If you’re in the ‘Resilience’ part of life,” she says, “where you can still reverse a lot of health conditions, then you might want to read that chapter and call it a day, and put it away until you’re in some very different stage of life. And, if you’re in crisis, if there’s someone in your house who is dying, then skip the early parts and turn to the last two chapters and you’ll get a lot out of that.”

Butler’s inspiration was an antique text called Ars Moriendi, translated from the Latin as The Art of Dying. The text dates back to the 1400s and is a kind of medieval guidebook on the best way to meet death. She calls it one of the first bestselling self-help books. “It framed dying as a spiritual ordeal, and it named five different sorts of temptations and emotional struggles at the end of life, and how your attendants or friends could reassure you and help you through that.”

Though the fact of dying hasn’t changed, the circumstances of death have been upended since the Middle Ages. Butler started the writing process mindful of what links ancient ideas of death with contemporary ones.

“I do think there’s some commonality to what people think of as a good death. Clean and comfortable and relatively free from pain, having people that you love around you, being spiritually at peace,” she says. “Those things are still the same.”

The new book also offers up practical policy ideas to address what she calls a “technology-rich but relationship-poor” health care system. One such idea is a Medicare program known as PACE, which keeps ailing seniors out of hospitals and nursing-care facilities when it’s practical to do so, while still meeting their needs for home care, therapy and medication. The problem is, PACE is limited in its capacities and its funding. Still, there are many more down-to-earth approaches people can adopt to make a fulfilling end of life better for everyone—approaches that previous generations knew something about.

“You look at the ‘Greatest Generation,’” Butler says, referring to those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II. “They had stronger social networks and more of an understanding to bring a covered dish when someone has a major health crisis. We need to relearn some of those more rural or red-state values of neighborliness and being part of community groups. That stuff matters.”

Katy Butler discusses ‘The Art of Dying Well’ on Friday, July 31, online at 5pm. Free; $5 donation suggested. RSVP required at Napabookmine.com.

Original article by Wallace Baine, with additional reporting by Charlie Swanson.