Seahawks safety Quandre Diggs is worried about his home state, and he’s worried that one particular character flaw has led to the spread of COVID-19 as much as anything.
Diggs has been wary of Texas opening too quickly after the initial wave, and he thinks that any unwillingness on the part of his fellow citizens to wear face coverings is compounding the problem.
“As a country, as a whole, I feel like we’re just a cocky country that feels like we’re invincible, but we have the most cases in the world,” Diggs said, via SI.com. “At some point, we need to take that cockiness down, and I think we need to get humbled a little bit and let people know that, ‘Hey, continue to wear your mask.’ I feel like the mask mandate should have been in effect the whole time. If you were going to open up stuff, at least make the mask mandated when people are going to have to go out so you can’t spread it. But when you make it a choice, then you give people the choice not to wear it, then of course the choice is going to be like, “Oh, I forgot my mask at home, but I don’t need it.” It’s just one of those things. . . .
“It’s cockiness. It’s the absolute cockiness of America, of Americans, to think, ‘I don’t need a mask.’ I don’t understand it, there’s nobody taking away your freedom, you’re still able to go walk a street, you’re still able to go into the store — just put a freaking mask on, it’s not that serious.”
Diggs has been openly critical of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who was quick to want to get back to business, and now presides over one of the country’s hotspots for new infections. Last week, Abbott relented and issued a statewide mask mandate. But beyond anger at one politician, Diggs thinks it’s a particular character trait of the country at the root of the problem.
“My thing is, it’s about protecting others, and as a nation, we’re so self-[concerned],” he said. “We’re so cocky, and we’re so worried about ourselves and not worried about others and that’s kind of what got us in this predicament that we’re in now, with corona, with social justice, with the police brutality. We have one race worried about themselves instead of everybody just caring about each other. We do our own thing, and that’s kind of what got us into this predicament now.”
That, however, is a problem that no amount of masking and hand-washing and social distancing will be able to fix.