The point is, those “busy bodies” have asked their doctors. They have been told to wear masks, to avoid gatherings of more than a few people, and to get the vaccination when it is available.

Granted, at first, due to the shortage of personal protective gear and the extreme need of first responders and other medical personal to have priority access to masks, concerned citizens were asked to please not go out and buy up all the supplies of masks. And granted, at first the medical community was not sure about the efficacy of wearing masks. But now, after months of dealing with the pandemic, the medical community is speaking with overwhelming unity: mask wearing saves lives—not just the life of the person wearing it, but the lives of others who might get infected from the mask wearer if he or she is an asymptomatic carrier of the virus.

I can’t really believe you think that any doctor except a crank is going to say that your homemade wire mask is as effective as a cloth mask. And I can’t accept that the same young man who exhibited such good sense at such an early age in regards to seat belts has now morphed, somehow, into the man I see in the photo who is defying all medical knowledge and recommendations to parade barefaced (except for a few thin wires) in public places.

Where oh where has my brother Buzz gone? Where oh where has that laughing young man disappeared to? What has turned you into the defiant, tired-looking man in the photo, a man who looks startingly like our father but not at all like your own younger self. I want that young Buzz back. I want you to have the good sense to wear a mask. I want you to have the consideration, even if you don’t care about yourself, to respect that others do care and then to accede gracefully to their concerns.

After I saw your Facebook posting, I immediately wanted to respond—but I didn’t. Why? Because I knew my writing anything would not achieve my intended purpose. It wouldn’t prompt a rethinking. It would only provoke anger, and a war of words.

I thought about it, and I felt myself to be a coward for not posting on your page, but I just kept putting it off, thinking, “What’s the point, when writing anything has zero chance of success?” So, I didn’t.

And I wouldn’t have, until the events of January 6th, when I realized that my aversion to controversy, my training as a diplomat, and my fear of being trolled on the internet was preventing me from speaking out even when I thought I should. Without the insurrection at the Capitol, I probably still would not have written this letter to you. However, January 6th spurred me to make a resolution for 2021. I will speak out when I feel I should, even if uncomfortable or unpleasant or financially adverse results ensue.

When I realized, after the events at the Capitol, that staying silent was eating me alive, I also realized that political events were not the only subject that I was failing to address. I was also not confronting this, a brother who had somehow, in my opinion, gone dangerously astray and was endangering himself and others.

Having had COVID-19 myself already, I know it is bad, really bad, with long-lingering effects. All of my growing up years, and that means all of yours, too, we heard about our Great Aunt Gladys, who died in the Spanish flu epidemic. We know that even young, healthy people can succumb to a deadly virus.

But perhaps we also naively thought that, a hundred years after the Spanish flu, modern medicine would soon put a stop to any newly emergent virus. After all, we stopped Ebola and swine flu and SARS. Why not this one?

I am going to stop myself from veering off to the political, because I want to keep the focus personal. I could talk about how under previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, the United States took a leading role in helping to stop pandemics. I won’t go into all of that, because it is irrelevant to the situation in which we find ourselves today, in January 2021, long past the time when the virus could have been contained, or at least better contained. We squandered our knowledge and our hard-won policies on how to contain deadly viruses. My focus here is on personal responsibility. Yours. Mine.

Maybe government mandates are bad and we should just let people arrive at independent decisions to wear or not wear a mask. That is, repeat the seat belt “freedom to choose” option. The problem with that is the virus is too deadly and strikes too quickly and silently. With horror, I learned of the death of a woman I knew at Rice. She was struck down very early in the pandemic, in New York City, alone in her apartment, probably unaware of the extreme danger posed by this silent killer. If the government knows of a danger posed to its citizens by a threat, whatever the nature of the threat, isn’t it obliged to act to protect its citizens? But that is an argument for another day.