I came across a stunning news article last month. In it I read that the county health department (the county we recently left) sued three Christian schools over their failure to comply with mask mandates by children aged two and up. Let me emphasize: two and up. Two is the age of a baby still learning to read facial expressions.
I’m not sure I can express how thankful I am to be out of that county, and we weren’t even attending a private school.
We’ve gone from looking out our front window at carnage, hate, and literal signs that said Honk if you think the police are f-ing dirtbags and Don’t be a ****, get your f-ing vaccine, morons!
–to walking into a small country school mask-less where the principal passes out candy and kindergarten teachers give students hugs. They schedule fall field trips to the pumpkin patch and open the gym for kids to shoot hoops.
I’ve sat in on school board meetings. I’ve shaken hands. I’ve gone to potlucks. I’m three hours away from passing out walking tacos (gloveless!) at the school carnival. I’m actually going to use the same spoon to dollop sour cream onto chips and cheese and I’m not going to feel guilty about it.
Sure, some of it is the urban-to-rural cultural exchange that makes it so sharp, but I can’t help but believe that my own life is more humanized simply by being around other people who value people over rules. Folks who develop their own opinions apart from groupthinkers, fearmongerers, politicians, and activists. People who are more caught up in community than scary statistics.
One doesn’t necessarily get the picture of such stark differences by watching the news. Instead, the news makes us feel like we are helpless bystanders watching the world burn down around us. So here I’m going to attempt to describe what I’ve witnessed as a non-journalist over the last six months through the lens of the pandemic.
One of the more alarming things was that Denver mandated vaccinations for all employees, school staff, and law enforcement. I suppose it was a gradual incline over the last eighteen months. When there was a stay at home mandate, the next likely step was a mask mandate, and so on. We got used to people telling us what to do, they talked themselves into thinking it was for our own good. It was logical that enforcing it with an arm of iron was next.
Denver’s neighboring county, where we lived, began this strong-arm approach to this fall’s school plans.
Last year, in our city school, the new language learners were separated from native speakers. Imagine: the six year olds from the previous year were masked up and sorted out: the kids who knew English in a normal room and the Title I kids in another. Child development, mental health, and equal opportunity played no part in the division–we were trying to keep germs from being spread. It worried the parents who spoke Khmer or Spanish at home, because they knew their kids needed to practice normal English conversation with other English speakers. It devastated the kids, who missed their friends.
Of course, this was complicated by months of iPad learning at home with zero human contact. No one was allowed in the school library, no one stepped a foot in the cafeteria. When all was said and done, children had spent two-thirds of the school year at home, a third at socially-distanced, masked-up school. Some teachers quit. Parents were looked at as potential health threats and not allowed to darken the doorway.
This is complicated by non-pandemic “concerns” the district was trying to address even before the current situation, issues like inclusivity and diversity, mental wellness and school violence.
Don’t misread here–currently at our little rural school, parent volunteers are also not invited into the school during the school day for any old reason, which they were in the past. And anti-bullying and mental health are both big talking points. But the unwelcome versus welcome attitude between the liberal culture we left to the more conservative we live in now is alarming.
I detected the general feeling in Colorado was sadness, and it came mostly from the families with whom we attended school. It was a collective shrug, a well, what can we do about it? It’s a pandemic. People are sick and dying. Do what we can to prevent it–and that meant wearing masks, avoiding eye contact at the store or park, and eventually complying with vaccine mandates.
But I also detected from the decision-makers and solution-finders an air of superiority in addressing compliance. Specifically, there was a trajectory of public disdain for people who didn’t immediately jump on board with “science” and “public health”. As a parent in the public schools, I was sent emails urging us to fall in line and strictly obey rules put into place for my health and safety. If you want your kids in school, it’s time to comply. No visiting friends and neighbors outside of school. Mask up; no more than six people in your house at any time.
Fast forward to now, and the governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, stepped up his iron-fist game with the declaration, “we wish their [unvaccinated, hospital patients] misery gets the message out about why people need to be vaccinated,” and “the majority of health care workers across the state are very relieved that a handful of their colleagues who haven’t yet been vaccinated will either be gone–remove that threat from the workplace–or get vaccinated.”
The non-compliant people who sign his paycheck are a threat.
Contrast that kind of talk with the new life I’m living eight hundred miles away from Denver: I am welcome to keep my vaccination status private. I am welcome to apply for a job or enter a restaurant without a vaccine “passport”. It is the same as wearing sweatpants instead of jeans–possibly curious, but certainly no threat.
My kids are welcome in the schools. I am welcome to make conversation with strangers, instead of fearing the worst or assuming I’m endangering myself or them by exchanging pleasantries. I regularly invite more than six unvaccinated people into my home.
I am seen as a person, not a statistic or a threat.
We saw the light last year, which is a major reason our family moved far, far away from the overreach happening in Denver.
Sometimes getting fed up is okay.
Leaving is okay. (Let’s not forget the whole situation with Lot’s family. Moving wasn’t an act of cowardice–it was a survival technique.)
And it is a good reminder that when humans in power come up with human solutions, it doesn’t always work to the public’s advantage. Cross that out–it never works out to everyone’s advantage. Take for example the new study that found the state’s vax-lottery was a total waste of money. That’s five million dollars–five one-million dollar “winners”–of federal dollars used for the purpose of enticing people to get a shot. Now it’s been shown it was in no way effective in achieving the desired herd immunity.
Think if we had, as tax payers, the voice in deciding where that money went! How much money I’ve donated and raised personally to assure public school teachers and students have the supplies they need!
See how leaders often lose sight of what’s important? And freedom is the casualty.
You can pretend you are good, think you are good, believe you are good, convince others you are good, enforce rules that are good. You can coerce and you can punish other people when they don’t adopt your brand of goodness. You can erode their own confidence by continually berating them as fools, and they might comply. You silence them by fear, and you tell yourself their compliance is submission. You might pat yourself on the back for the hard, good work you’ve done.
One day, your exceedingly high standards no longer allow for association with folks who cannot meet them. In your mind you devalue them till they seem sub-human.
How nefarious.
This is how freedom is lost–it is wrenched from the hands of others, and it’s stamped with a seal of approval.
It’s marked GOOD.
I’ll be serving walking tacos at the school carnival later if you want to join me, because it is most certainly your choice to do what you want in this country.
I might look you in the eye when I’m chatting with you about the kids, the weather, and anything but your vaccination status. Because you know what? You’re human, and I am too.
I value your freedom to put sour cream on your nachos, and the freedom to make a thousand other decisions.
