IF IT LOOKS LIKE A CULT AND SOUNDS LIKE A CULT…: The Cult of Masked Schoolchildren
Masking is now little more than an appealing delusion. It arms us with a visible symbol that communicates our commitment to minimizing the pandemic’s damage. It makes some of us feel empowered by giving us something “we can do” in the face of a largely invisible threat. To a certain extent, this is understandable. But most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity or trajectory of the virus. The loss to children remains difficult to capture in hard data, but will likely become clear in the years to come.
Less forgivable is the decision we’ve made as a society to shift the anxieties of adults onto the youngest members of society, who count on us to defend their interests before our own. It is thanks to the nature of this particular virus, rather than the foresight of American institutions or adults, that COVID has been relatively impotent against children. The majority of kids who have been infected have recovered without sequelae. And yet we continue to impose the most harmful and onerous restrictions on the youngest among us. While we purportedly do it to protect other age groups, empirical analysis suggests, for instance, that school closures in a given community have done nothing to slow the spread among the elderly in the same community.
When the history books are written, we will not look wise or kind for insisting that kids and toddlers wear masks for hours on end, year after year, without ever testing this policy with controlled trials. We will look ignorant, cruel, fearful, and cowardly. We might even look worse than our primitive ancestors who, when faced with great plagues, engaged in all sorts of bizarre, superstitious behavior—but which rarely included making kids suffer most.