The kids aren’t alright
Since this series of reports has been around for a month, one has the right to expect more coverage of the unabated mask ballyhoo that has enveloped society. This installment is just a preview of what is to come.
The United States was an outlier among the world’s nations in having so many jurisdictions that required two-year-olds to wear masks. There were very few other countries where mask mandates applied to children anywhere near that young. The WHO also did not recommend it.
If the kids aren’t alright, maybe it’s because adults who forced them to maskify are also not alright. That doesn’t excuse grownups’ hateful, abusive behavior described in this entry.
In November 2020, a strange exchange appeared on a website for parents in Berkeley, California. Keep in mind that many people were long since done with the pandemic by then. At issue was the fact that most Berkeley residents did not wear masks at playgrounds. This thread was started by someone asking how to handle children and parents seen at playgrounds not wearing masks.
Yes, outdoor playgrounds, of all places!
Several parents who posted in that thread said they actually confronted other people’s children at playgrounds and demanded that they wear masks. One bragged of confronting a father and telling him, “Any child over three by law should be wearing a mask. If they can’t then they should not be at the park.”
Yet one parent of an unmasked two-year-old reported being on the receiving end of such harassment and hounded out of a park.
The town manager of Plymouth, Massachusetts, demanded closure of an outdoor skate park because nobody wore masks.
Milton, Massachusetts, closed all its parks in December 2020 because of young people congregating without masks.
Harassment at playgrounds wasn’t strictly confined to the United States. An online commenter said a woman reported them to bylaw enforcement at an Ottawa playground in May 2021 for going barefaced. That was just after Ontario reversed the playground closures in its latest stay-at-home order. (Remember, Ontario had a new stay-at-home order after vaccines came out.)
As the previous entry in this series suggests, schools were among the worst offenders. But when schools didn’t enforce COVID tyranny enough, somebody else was always sure to try. In December 2020, the town health officer of Kingston, Massachusetts, fielded complaints that students in the local school system were bounding about without masks.
There was no bottom as to how low things could sink. In the winter of 2021-22, a few pages from a yearbook of an elementary school in Springfield, Oregon, appeared online. It showed that all of the second graders were forced to wear masks in their school portraits. A school district official tried to justify it by saying it was the previous year’s yearbook, and that the current year’s portraits did not require masks. She acted as if the current year erased the atrocities of the previous year. Yahoo News implied that reporting on this sorry episode was misinformation because the photos were a year old—as if being a year old means it didn’t happen. The story should have been that the school forced children to wear masks in their official portraits, but Yahoo turned it into a story about misinformation, even though the information sadly was accurate. School officials also bragged that in-person schooling had returned in the spring of 2021—as if we were supposed to be thankful that only the first seven months of the school year were ruined by remote school.
One of the reasons schools take photos is in case a child goes missing. Photos with masks are useless for finding missing children.
It’s bad enough that the school required masks in portraits. But we have to ask this tough question: Where were the parents? Out of all those kids in that class, were there any parents who questioned what was going on? You have to assume that somebody did. If they didn’t, it would be like the stories you hear of crime-plagued neighborhoods where a person is beaten to death right out on the street and everyone just steps over the body instead of calling for help. Is that how low society fell? Only a year before the photos were taken, this would not have been considered even remotely normal or acceptable. Can you imagine parents in the 1970s tolerating this? There would have been a police investigation of the school lickety-split. It’s not too late for police to investigate now—and they should.
As with other shameful pandemic events, some have exploited this pitiful incident for their own goals, but that doesn’t change the facts of what happened.
Acts that were considered child abuse or threatening behavior before 2020 have now been normalized. Yet anyone who points out that this behavior was not accepted before 2020 is demonized. It may surprise some to learn that we once had a society in which it was not taboo for toddlers to show their faces. It’s astounding that things got so bad in 2020, as it was far worse than what anyone before 2020 feared even as the worst-case scenario. What’s more is that we were told this would end once vaccines were available. That turned out to be a lie, as it only got worse.