Montgomery County Councilmember Kristin Mink (Democrat, District 5) gained local and national notoriety as an “activist” and self-described “outspoken advocate for climate, immigration rights, and social justice.”
In March 2020, CM Mink wrote on her blog that she “while still teaching middle school (virtually), I co-founded Masks For America, a volunteer-run nonprofit that crowdfunded, sourced, and delivered PPE to frontline workers and high-risk communities. This included personally driving trucks across states at night to make deliveries.”
Interestingly, it appears she co-founded “Masks 4 America” with one Saira Rao. Who is she? Her bio line, direct from “Masks 4 America”:
For forty years, she wasted her precious time aspiring to be white and accepted by dominant white society, a futile task for anyone not born with white skin. Several years ago, Saira began the painful process of dismantling her own internalized oppression. Saira is a lawyer-by-training, a former congressional candidate, a published novelist and an entrepreneur. She is a co-founder of Race2Dinner and Haven Media.
Lovely. Race2Dinner is just about as nutty as it sounds.
Anyways, while the mask craze was certainly not unique to Kristin Mink or Montgomery County politicians, she seems to still be stuck on indoor masking as some kind of prevention mechanism (see twitter capture below). But in 2023, and indeed before, there is/was ample evidence that it isn’t effective at preventing transmission. There is nothing to “regret” for not wearing a mask anymore indoors. If you want to wear one, wear one, but don’t shame others for not engaging in the process.
“Mink’s masks” (joking of course, she just helped set-up the crowd source for them) are probably the first or second most-polluted item now and the results are terrible for streams and rivers and the local environment. Excerpted from the Southern Maryland Chronicle, from an article about Chesapeake Bay micro-plastics in June, 2021:
The masks are everywhere, thrown on the ground and sent into run-off streams, sucked down into street-side sewer and run-off channels and then onward into the rivers and streams that create a lot of the region’s drinking water. Then, they make their way into the Chesapeake Bay and pollute and toxify the wild-life and crabs there. They take hundreds of years to decompose and should be kept far away from such places.
“I could not help noticing during my most recent litter patrol in the proximity of my residence bordering Patterson Park a plethora of discarded masks. I picked up at least 15 of these objects within 150 feet of my front door.” wrote a fed-up reader to the Baltimore Sun in March 2022.
Councilmember Mink isn’t responsible for the sloppy littering of other people of course, but her prior rush to action and mask manufacturing virtue-signaling surely contributed to the volume of discarded masks. Couldn’t CM Mink maybe address how much mask pollution and litter she’s contributed to? Set a good example and bring up the mask litter issue? Lead a stream clean? On her “issues” campaign website there is not a single mention of the word “litter” or mask pollution.
This is a person who got famous for claiming that “children’s lives” were at stake because of who the Federal EPA administrator was in 2018.
When I confronted Trump’s Director of the Environmental Protection Agency in a restaurant in 2018, I told him, “I urge you to resign for what you’re doing to the environment” and noted that “we deserve to have someone at the EPA who takes climate change seriously.”
Does the councilmember take litter seriously? Local eco-toxicity and trash clean-up?
