by James A. Bacon
People, get a grip! Emotions over this mask business are running out of control — on both sides of the debate.
On the right: Amelia Ruffner King, a 42-year-old Luray mother, has been charged with a misdemeanor for issuing threats to the Page County School Board. “No mask mandates,” the Page Valley News reports her as saying. “My children will not come to school on Monday with a mask on, alright. That’s not happening. And I will bring every single gun loaded and ready,” King continued as she was cut off a second time by the chairman for exceeding the three-minute time limit during the citizen comment period. Then as she left the room, she added: “I’ll see ya’ll on Monday.”
That kind of rhetoric is unacceptable. In a civilized society people cannot publicly issue threats, even if the violence is only implied. (Not to mention, such rhetoric feeds the leftist narrative that the parents-rights movement is a potential terrorist threat to democracy.)
On the left: Michelle Cades, a Fairfax County mother, says her 8th-grade special-needs daughter will no longer be able to attend class if the mask mandate is lifted. Reports American University Radio: her daughter’s anxiety about COVID is so extreme that she needs extra time to navigate the halls between classes so she can avoid clusters of other students. “If suddenly lots of students were not wearing masks at all, either in the halls or in my kids’ classes,” Cades says, “I honestly don’t know how my child would tolerate going to school.”
Where does the child’s anxiety come from? The news media? Her family? Her peers? Life for teenagers is full of risks, from drug and alcohol addiction to automobile accidents, from sexually transmitted disease to… the flu. Why the fixation on COVID? The risks from COVID for high school students is low. Of the 162,000 reported COVID cases in the Fairfax health district, only 63 hospitalizations have been reported for the 10- to 19-year-old age bracket. Deaths: zero. For high-schoolers, COVID amounts to the flu. But some people are acting as if it is the second coming of the Black Death.
Yes, there are important philosophical questions at stake. As a society, we need to find the right balance between upholding personal liberties and protecting the public health from a continually evolving and imperfectly understood disease. Mask hysteria does not help us find that balance.
