As mask mandates lift, what's a high school student to do?

As mask mandates begin to ease around the country, some readers are celebrating while others remain wary of being among large crowds if masks are not being worn.

“Our mask mandate just got dropped, so it’s up to personal choice now,” a high school senior wrote me recently. She tells me that if she were to go to any school event she would still choose to wear a mask. “Not a lot of people are talking about it,” she wrote.

They should be talking about it, and school administrators should be facilitating the conversations. High school is a particularly perilous time when it comes to wanting to fit in. Worrying about whether wearing a mask to an event risks appearing uncool should not be a factor in deciding what’s best for your own health and peace of mind.

It is also natural to want to be free of the masks and other restrictions faced over the past couple of years. We may be done with the idea of being cautious, but COVID is still out there. It remains a concern particularly for the most vulnerable among us.

One challenge we face as we move from treating the pandemic as one requiring public health mandates to ensure everyone’s safety is to acknowledge it is not as pervasive but is still affecting us. We may be ready to move on, but COVID may not be ready just yet to move on completely.

The shift will likely be gradual and complicated. In some college classrooms, for example, even if the college would like to drop the mask requirement, professors might be allowed to teach without wearing a mask while students must still wear them to adhere to municipal regulations. Those same regulations might require the maskless professor to remain several feet away from students at all times.

But what’s a high school student, or anyone else for that matter, to do when they are desperate to start attending public events again, but want to go only if everyone will be masked? They can certainly continue to wear a mask. But can they insist that others do?

Of course not. They can try to insist, but it may remain up to individual choice.

My high school reader could canvass her friends to see whether they plan to continue to wear masks to dances, concerts, or sporting events, but that will not guarantee that everyone at these events is masked.

Rather than simply lift the mask mandate for public events, my reader’s high school administrators should take the time to provide some guidance to students to help them decide. Such guidance may not be heeded, but it’s the right thing to do.

Ultimately, it’s the student’s decision. If she is uncomfortable about being at large events where people are unmasked, she should not go. And she should never feel pressure to not wear a mask out of fear of appearing uncool. That she is wrestling with the decision out of concern about her and others’ health is cool enough.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is it ever too late to apologize?

The first time a portion of an article I wrote for publication was censored was when I was 13-years-old by the faculty adviser of the John Hill junior high school newspaper “The Jaguar,” in Jan. 1970. That issue of the newspaper was 28 pages long. We ran copies of it off on a mimeograph next to containers of civil defense fallout shelter supplies in a closet on the basement floor.

The topic of my article was hardly controversial. I was reporting the results of the school’s annual talent show. I cited the names of the judges, the lighting crew, and the names of the third-, second- and first-place winners. For the third- and second-place winners, the details of their performances were specific. But for the first place-winner, the reporting was inconsistent. There was a two-way tie for first place. One was a performance of “Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, Opus 27, No. 1, movement two.” That tied with a performance by five students and is simply listed as a “song and dance routine.”

I remember that routine vividly and had even talked about it with my classmate Lloyd Wisdom about six years ago after we’d reconnected on social media. James Brown’s “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” began playing over the speakers in the auditorium as Lloyd and four other African American classmates walked in, in unison. As Brown sang out “Say It Loud,” Lloyd and company raised their gloved fists in the air and shouted, “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” The five classmates stepped loudly and made their way up the middle aisle and to the stage and then exited similarly as the song came to an end. I recall there being wild applause, although Lloyd told me he didn’t remember the applause being as wild as I’d remembered.

It wasn’t until I received a package from an old friend a few weeks ago that I remembered that the title of Brown’s song was edited from my article. My friend’s aunt had collected the newspaper and many other artifacts from our childhood. He received the newspaper after she’d died and thought I would like to have it.

I don’t remember how hard I argued to keep the title of the song in the article. I remember the faculty adviser as sometimes being harsh and once accusing me of plagiarism before confirming that I had indeed interviewed the Town of Boonton’s postmaster, but neither is an excuse for not having fought harder. Lloyd’s and his fellow performers’ names were in the article, and all of the students at the school knew what the performance had been. That too was not enough reason for not having fought harder.

It’s 52 years too late to right a wrong, but it’s never too late for an apology. Sadly, Lloyd died unexpectedly last August, shortly after we talked about baseball and the woeful record of his beloved Baltimore Orioles. Another classmate who performed with Lloyd at our junior high talent show was in touch about 10 years ago, and we caught up then. We’re more than overdue to catch up again. It seems as if the right thing would be to apologize for not fighting harder 52 years ago.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Are you responsible for returning something you never asked for in the first place?

As a side hustle a reader we’re calling Frida started to pick up some work through one of the many companies online that hire people on a job-by-job basis to do tasks. Whether it was serving as a mathematics tutor or mental health counselor or delivering a restaurant’s food orders or fulfilling a handyperson’s task is not critical to the story. What’s important is that Frida took on the work and after several months of doing it was enjoying both the work and the steady income from it.

After about six months of working with the company and receiving regular direct deposits into her checking account for the work done, Frida got a message from the company management that a bonus of $1,000 was being deposited into her account because she had referred several new employees to the company. Frida checked and the money had indeed been deposited into her checking account.

Frida was thrilled to receive the cash, but she was puzzled. She hadn’t recommended to any of her friends that they sign up to work with the company. She figured maybe she was being rewarded for some other milestone and continue to do the work as it came her way.

“About two weeks later I got an email telling me it was an error,” wrote Frida. Apparently, the bonus had been wrongly assigned to several workers. “They apologized and asked me to email them $900, but to keep the remaining $100 as a sign of how sorry they were about the error.”

Frida plans to return the $900 because she wants to continue working with the company, she wrote. But she wonders if she really ought to be expected to return something she didn’t ask for in the first place. “Wouldn’t it have been OK for me to keep the full thousand and suggest they be more careful next time?” she asked. “Shouldn’t they let me keep it as a sign of how much they value me as an employee? After all, it wasn’t my error.”

I’ve received similar questions before. A reader receives too much money from an ATM or a bank erroneously deposits too much in his account. A checker at a grocery store returns too much change to a shopper. A large online retailer sends a reader a box of books and garden tools she never ordered. “What’s the right thing to do?” is always the question.

The right thing when you get something to which you are not entitled or you didn’t earn or didn’t purchase is to try to correct the errors. I’m not a legal expert so I don’t know the penalty for keeping money banks may have erroneously given, but regardless of the law, the right thing is to point out the error and return it. Same goes at the grocery store and the online retailer. In some cases, the online retailer may tell the customer to keep the goods since the cost of shipping and returns doesn’t make it worth their while to have them sent back.

Frida made a good choice by returning the money when she was alerted to the error. That she’s $100 richer in the process is a pleasant side benefit of doing the right thing.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

What's your take on Bonds and the Hall of Fame?

“What is your take on Bonds and the Hall of Fame?”

The text arrived shortly before the results were announced of the voting this year by sports writers on who would be elected in Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Hall of Fame. Barry Bonds, a former San Francisco Giants player who certainly racked up Hall of Fame statistics over the course of his career, was in his final year of eligibility to be voted in. Looming questions about his alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs to improve his abilities on the field and at the plate kept him from reaching the 75% threshold of votes he needed to gain entrance.

“Is this a trick question?” I responded.

The text came from my college mentor and friend, Larry Grimes. Larry officiated my marriage to the woman I’d eat bees for. A Hemingway scholar, he is a regular guest at our house in Boston, which is a few blocks from the Kennedy Library, where Ernest Hemingway’s papers are housed. We have been regular guests at his home in Bethany, West Virginia, and now Colorado, where he’s retired. We celebrated the publication of his latest book of poetry, Upon a Slender Stalk. But I can’t recall us ever talking baseball.

Nevertheless, I tried to respond.

“MLB makes this challenging since it has been inconsistent over the years,” I texted. “There are players in the Hall who likely used performance-enhancing drugs before their ban. My take is that sports writers who vote are acting ethically if they clearly ignore use of performance-enhancing drugs for all eligible players or consistently factor use of such drugs in to every choice.”

Larry thought this was “good wisdom,” observing that sports writers are trying to pilot a ship without a rudder since there has been no single rule on which they can all make a decision. “Whatever the conclusion, I think the rudderless ship will smash on the rocks,” he texted.

My take was that even if sports writers or ballplayers made bad decisions and were aware they’ve made bad decisions, that was a form of ethical decision-making. They weighed the right and wrong and made the choice.

Larry was quick to respond that such thinking is akin to what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” in his book “The Cost of Discipleship.” It’s a version, Larry observed of Hemingway’s shoddy definition of morality in “Death in the Afternoon,” where he writes, “…what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after…”

“It’s a code of the gut,” Larry texted. “But a code.”

I’m with Dietrich and Larry on this. Leaving the question of ethics to the sports writer without any guidance from the governing body of the sport results in inconsistencies. The right thing strikes me that if MLB doesn’t weigh in with guidelines, then the Hall of Fame or the sports writers themselves should establish guidelines for judgment rather than leaving it to each voter to make up their own.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.