You may have noticed that people tend to be much ruder online than they are in real life. There’s a very good reason for that. You see, no matter how rude you are, people can’t punch you in the face on Twitter. In real life, they absolutely can. Some dork from San Francisco named Matt Schneiderman seems to have lost sight of that basic fact in this column he wrote for Yahoo:
Here, the person seems to willfully be endangering those around them, your anger is appropriately ballistic. Just as you’d scream at a driver doing 100 MPH in a school zone, you’re going to scream at the person not wearing a face mask when you’re standing in line because you’re in line with your kids and elderly people.
If you’ve tried the softer approach and hit a wall of willful ignorance or downright anger, get help. If you’re in a store, inform customer service — the on-site manager or another employee should enforce the business’s rules a la “no shirt, no shoes, no service.” As much legal right as the person may have outside the store to flout mask-wearing, inside it’s the store’s right to refuse them.
If a person is blatantly putting others at risk, you’ve tried the above tactics, and you’re not in a business setting, and want to get a message across, go for it. Let loose a salvo of swear words. Sometimes, you just need to yell.