Time to ditch the masks at theme parks, that means you Disney!

Theme parks around the country have relaxed the use of masks around the country but to be honest, they should end them or require them all the time.

“Got your mask?”, my 18 year old son calls out to me as I locked the car and began the walk from the parking lot at Disney’s EPCOT. I returned, opened the door and sifted through the console holder and snagged it up.

I wear my mask. In the grocery store, at the schools, gas stations, and yes, I wear them to theme parks. It’s mandatory that you have one if you are going to one of the Disney parks. I can’t speak for Universal Studios because I have never been there but at Walt Disney World, the mask mandates need to be forgotten.

The rules are simple, if you go indoors, you have to put on your mask. It was easy to comply to this and I simply wore my mask around my neck when I wasn’t indoors. As I stood with my wife and two year old waiting for my other kids to finish a ride they were on, I realized that masks, well, they were absolutely 100% pointless and it was then I realized also that this entire thing is about politics, not safety.

Hear me out because this is not a political statement. This is about safety and no matter how you look at it, it is one of two things, not safe or no one really cares.

Inside the closed spaces you wear your mask. When the line you are in goes from the outside turnstiles indoors, there is a cast member waiting at that part of the entrance to remind you that the mask has to go on. That is when it really hit me. Why the heck does it matter?

See, I just stood 40 minutes or more outside with all these people. There is no six feet social distancing required. No X marks on the floor or pathways. On some rides, there is a plexiglass wall that stands as a reminder to the early days of COVID. Now, they only serve to remind us that the pandemic is still out there.

At no point during my traversing of the line did any one come through and clean the silver rails of the turnstiles, the one that my two year old was swinging on. The one where the other kid who was going opposite of me was licking. There was no hand sanitizing stations that actually had sanitizer.

The masks, they are a mirage. Inside the stores, guests rummage through clothing, pick up trinkets, coffee mugs, and souvenirs. They twisted them in their hands, showed them to family and then dropped them back where they found them. The next guest did the same and so on and so one. I watched in the Emporium, the Magic Kingdom front and center gift shop on Main Street, as items exchanged from person to person with no cleaning of any kind. No bin to drop them into to sterilize.

I found myself laughing. Disney has brought back Pin Trading but there is a catch. Cast members no longer wear the lanyards with pins on them, now, there is a pin board, you pick the one you want, a cast member hands it to you and you drop your return pin in a box to be cleaned…and all I could do was ask why? No one cared to wipe the table down and no one wiped the blue car when I got off Spaceship Earth at Epcot.

My point is simple, make masks mandatory and clean after the guests or eliminate the need for masks indoors and outdoors as it is doing nothing to stop the transmission. Outside, if someone has COVID, they will 100% give it to someone else just because there is nothing in place to stop that transfer. Indoors, you may not get coughed on but if they have it, chances are it has already spread around through the stuff they touch.

Sorry Disney, I love your parks, all of them but there is no way that mask for the few minutes I am inside is going to do anything to stem the spread of this virus. Nothing.