We dined this weekend at Bill's Café, the oldest continuously owned family restaurant in Collin County, Texas.  The waitresses wear t-shirts that say, "Bless our troops, especially the snipers."  What's not to love?

As if it could get any better, there wasn't a single mask to be seen at Bill's, and the place was packed.

You might say the folks at Bill's were doing their patriotic duty to "follow the science" and to be good stewards of the environment.

The science, contrary to the talking heads who want to run (and not incidentally ruin) your life, says masks are utterly ineffective in keeping you from catching or passing on the China virus.  Zero percent effective.

But masks do collect all the germs you exhale on the inside and all the germs you leave when you touch the outside.  And the disposable masks that everyone is so eager to cover their face with are made of a plastic that is almost indestructible, which means they will be with us long after the China virus is a faint memory and you and I have died from something much more certain to kill us.

When my bride and I walk the dog a mile in the morning and a mile in the afternoon, yours truly picks up trash along the way and bags it because we don't want our beloved Texas to turn into California, whence we fled eight years ago.

Since COVID mania, among the fast food plastic containers and cigarette butts, I find on average one or two discarded masks every day.  They have become ubiquitous like beer and soda cans.  And that's just on two miles of our daily walk.  Multiply that by however many other two-mile routes there are in our town, then multiply that by every town in our county of one million people, then multiply that by 254 counties in Texas, then by 50 states, then by 195, nations and you begin to get a feel for the scope of the environmental damage being done daily by discarded masks.

According to OceansAsia, a Hong Kong–based environmental group:

"More than 1.5 billion disposable face masks will wind up in the world's oceans this year — polluting the water with tons of plastic and endangering marine wildlife..."

"Single-use face masks are made from a variety of meltblown plastics and are difficult to recycle due to both composition and risk of contamination and infection," the report says.

"These masks enter our oceans when they are littered or otherwise improperly discarded, when waste management systems are inadequate or non-existent, or when these systems become overwhelmed due to increased volumes of waste."

Apart from depersonalizing every human encounter (don't you miss seeing smiles, even frowns?), and aside from existing principally to exert government control over you, masks are worse than useless.  They also are ultimately poison for the environment.

You'd think the lefties among the environmental green movement would pick up on that.  It's so interesting when progressives come in conflict: greenie freaks versus COVID control freaks.  As we say around our house on a daily basis after checking the pulse of our land, it's a fallen world.

Mark Landsbaum is a Christian retired journalist, former investigative reporter, editorial writer, and columnist.  He also is a husband, father, grandfather, and Dodgers fan.  He can be reached at mark.landsbaum@gmail.com.

Image: Pixabay.