Students in Vermont’s capital are planning to walk out Wednesday to demand that school mask mandates not be lifted. Vermont officials recently recommended that schools with an 80 percent vaccination rate do not need to require masks, but these students are irate and are demanding continued, even heightened mandates.
Titled “Protest Against Lifting Mask Mandates” on an online Vermont community forum for Montpelier High School, handouts and infographics titled “Safety Over Normalcy” proclaim:
Join your fellow students and community members in a walk out and march to city hall out to protest the mask mandate being lifted and general lack of covid safety at MHS.
Vermont has been a pretty safe area to weather COVID, and healthy children are of course at minuscule risk. It appears children at this school can simply decide to walk out of class and walk around the city, so perhaps the kids will simply self-impose mask mandates. Mask-lovers can be pretty autocratic, at any age.
Vermont is already established as a place where the young hate free speech and physically assault professors with whom they disagree. (Though nearby Dartmouth College is vying for leadership in the cancel speech movement.)
Students demanding totalitarian protection are increasingly common in the indoctrinated Generation Duh. Perhaps future protest events will call for evening curfew enforcement, increased homework, banning alcohol at football games, raising the driving and drinking ages, or a crackdown on premarital sex. The irony is that those shifts would all be beneficial for youth, and even save lives — the inverse of masking.
For healthy children, the flu is deadlier than COVID. Whether or not masking effectively prevents transmission, the practice certainly does cause alienation, anxiety, and other psychological harms. For some children, they cause physical problems as well. What of those concerns? One event infographic proclaims:
MASKS ARE ONE OF THE ONLY WAYS PROVEN TO CONSISTENTLY PROTECT PEOPLE FROM COVID THROUGHOUT THE PANDEMIC. MASKING ONLY WORKS WHEN EVERYONES WEARING THEM. IF WE LIFT THE MASK MANDATES AT SCHOOLS NOW EVEN WITH HIGH VACCINATION RATES COVID CASES WILL RISE PUTTING OUR COMMUNITIES AT RISK.
The mask cult students, doubtless conditioned by the histrionic terrors of their unbalanced “progressive” parents, seek to “protect themselves” from other children with exposed facial features. But as with vaccines, if masks work, these fears are irrational: “Vaccines only work if everyone gets jabbed!” “Masks must be universally worn because vaccines don’t work as advertised!”
The effort is petitioning for more than mere mandatory mask measures. One call to action lists specific demands which include “reinstate regular surveillance testing”; provide “alternate lunch areas,” “alternate schooling,” N95 masks, and hand sanitizers; and “enforce the mask policy and not let students consistently wear masks incorrectly.” Papers, testing, stop-points, mask enforcement … sounds like reform school, or Catholic boarding school, only stricter. The phrase “Jawohl!” comes to mind.
Students and parents now screeching for more rules and restrictions seem to have lost their reason along with an awareness of scientific facts. He who would trade liberty for security deserves neither; he who would irrationally do so deserves a kick in the derriere.