Anti-mask adults obscure lessons for kids
The moment mask grievance became a thing — which is to say, the moment masks became a thing — a clever counterpoint was born.
I see a variation of it every couple days on Twitter or Facebook, sandwiched between news stories about parents hurling death threats at public officials.
It focuses on the masksin-schools debate, and it goes something like this:
“So schools can mandate no leggings, but they can’t mandate masks?”
“If you make girls cover up to protect boys’ concentration, you can make everyone wear masks to protect against a virus.”
“If schools can enforce no visible bra straps, they can enforce masks.”
I appreciate the sentiment.
Unfortunately, sexist dress codes and mask outrage are two sides of the same coin. At the heart of both is the same depressing truth: A lot of grownups would rather pander and posture than actually protect kids.
Forcing girls to cover their shoulders but refusing to force kids to cover their mouths and noses during a pandemic isn’t a contradiction. It’s corroboration. It’s a full-throated acknowledgment that children’s well-being rarely drives policy.
Policing wardrobes has nothing to do with protecting girls’ bodies or boys’ ability to learn. It’s retrograde nonsense — “Girls are wily temptresses!” “Boys can’t control themselves!” — parading around as discretion.
It’s a willful disregard for
what the moment requires.
And so is protesting masks.
Children are entering their third pandemicimpacted school year, and we ought to be doing everything in our power to keep schools safely open and students safely in classrooms.
Unfortunately, a significant number of kids remains ineligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, and child cases have been steadily increasing in the United States since the beginning of July. Children now represent 18% of new weekly reported cases, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
It remains rare, thankfully, for a child to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and even rarer for a child to die from COVID-19. Still, we owe it to children and
their families, teachers and community members — particularly those who are immunocompromised — to do everything we can to stop kids from contracting and spreading the virus. Masks help. An abundance of research shows masks decrease the transmission of droplets and aerosol particles, through which COVID-19 mostly spreads. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends universal indoor masking for students, staff, teachers and visitors to schools, regardless of vaccination status.
The CDC also notes that wearing a mask does not raise the carbon dioxide level in the air you breathe, since CO2 molecules are small enough to easily pass through mask material, unlike the larger respiratory
droplets that carry the virus that causes COVID19.
And yet. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a law in June banning school mask mandates, and announced recently that schools that go ahead and mandate masks will be excluded from federal COVID-19 relief money.
In Florida, education officials recently decided school districts that require students to wear masks can be investigated and punished, including having funds withheld or school officials removed.
In Louisiana, a group of anti-mask parents was recently recorded yelling taunts and threats at health care workers leaving a local school board meeting.
Pick a state, and you’re likely to find some grownups pitching a fit about kids
wearing masks.
I can’t think of a worse set of messages to be sending our kids, whose lives are permanently shaped by a pandemic. Their schools closed. Their cherished rituals were canceled. Their teams and clubs couldn’t meet. Their support systems — friends, cousins, mentors, therapists — were often accessible only via screen.
They watched the COVID-19 death toll climb to 624,000 in the U.S. and 4.4 million across the globe. Those deaths included, in many cases, people they loved. As of June, more than 46,000 children in the U.S. lost one or both parents to COVID-19.
And now we’re sending them back to school against a backdrop of behavior that flies in the face of every lesson we all should have learned, and modeled, over these brutal months. Such as:
Heed the science. The stuff you learn in school, yes. But also the stuff that identifies the raging wildfires, massive floods, shrinking mountains, melting glaciers and natural disasters of unprecedented magnitude as consequences of a warming Earth. We need kids’ wise, young minds to help us solve this crisis.
Front-line workers are heroes. Signs in windows and Super Bowl commercials said as much, but footage of health care workers ducking a barrage of insults from anti-maskers speaks awfully loud.
My behavior affects your well-being; your behavior affects mine. It’s why I can’t hop in a car and drive home drunk. Or speed down the highway at 95 miles per hour. Or walk into a kindergarten class and light a cigarette. My freedoms don’t trump someone else’s right to live.
We learn as we go. This is true of a pandemic, and it’s true of life. We make missteps. We take paths that lead to dead ends. We consider new evidence as it becomes available. We calibrate. It wasn’t so long ago that a lot of us were sanitizing our bananas. Now we know better.
We should never stop searching for the truest, clearest path — the one informed by facts and compassion. The moment requires both.
My fondest hope is we survive this pandemic with our humanity intact. Our kids are watching to see how that’s done — and how it’s not.