Representative Joseph Chaplik
We think that we can safely say that you are sick of COVID. Everyone is. We all just want to be done with this, to not hear about friends and family falling ill, and for life to return back to a healthier normal. The quest towards this end has repeatedly led to both winners and losers, but we have unusually well defined instances of both in Scottsdale this past week.
First, we must commend Scottsdale Unified yet again for their recent action to extend their mask requirement until at least after fall break.While it’s proper to hope for the best, the delta variant has vanquished those hopes, so to act as if the virus has materially gone away would be foolhardy. Superintendent Scott Menzel and the entire board have walked the proper line of cautiousness throughout much of this pandemic, even as loud, angry hordes have done their best to make their unpaid jobs more difficult.
Speaking of those angry hordes, we find the organized, widespread resistance to children wearing masks to be particularly foolish. No one would ever consider children to be paragons of cleanliness. They have frequently been known as germ factories in normal times, so the fact that so many supposed conservatives are comfortable with kids bringing home a sometimes deadly but often debilitating virus boggles the mind. It just goes to show the depth that the entire pandemic has been politicized.
And that segues into who has been responding poorly to Covid, and for that we must bring up Joseph Chaplik, first term State Representative from Scottsdale’s own District 23. While Chaplik has touted himself as an economic conservative, which we applaud, it seems as though his biggest and loudest efforts have gone towards proliferating the spread of Covid and being particularly proud about it. From opining as to why people don’t wear masks to stop the spread of AIDS to authoring a bill allowing businesses to ignore mask mandates (and being exceedingly loud about the subject on Twitter), we have to wonder why he relishes being on the side of the pandemic.
It is unfortunate that politics got wrapped up with our response to Covid in the first place, although in our polarized, algorithm-driven society, we suppose it was inevitable. But some elected leaders have chosen to take a data-driven, sober approach (SUSD) and some have decided to damage the conservative brand and make Republicans look like fools (Chaplik). We wish more Republicans would take SUSD’s lead.