A Sad Revolution of Contradiction
Kids are protesting in favor of coercion and compliance rather than liberty and freedom.
Pandemic policies feature the same collectivist perspectives as any other collectivist policies – everybody must conform. If one does something (or is forbidden from doing something), everyone else must do that thing (or be prohibited from doing that thing).
No exceptions (except, of course for those in power. They always get a pass).
For me, that was particularly brought into sharp focus yesterday when students at a local high school staged a walkout protesting our state legislature’s efforts to BAN statewide mask mandates in schools. Keep in mind that the efforts at the state level do NOT prevent any student or group of students from wearing masks, they can still wear them should they choose – but that’s not good enough for these larval stage Marxists, they want to force everybody to comply.
The induced hysteria of the moment is summed up by the leader of the protest, PCHS junior Chris Henry:
“We are here because the state Senate passed a bill that will eliminate masks despite our county being one of the worst in the nation for COVID. I don’t want to choose between the health and safety of my family and coming to school. People are going to die as a result of this bill.”
But the demand for compliance has nothing to do with scientific data that masks work, much less prevent death – because there is no such evidence.
Nearly two years in, the data indicates masking policies have had no measurable effect in prevention of infection. Some of the lack of success has to do with the virtual impossibility of kids having masks hermetically sealed to their faces for the entire school day, some with the material of the mask, but as a practical matter, they have proven to be ineffective. As a medical method of prevention, masks are little more than a placebo, and from a social perspective, they are just a visual signal of tribal conformity.
To be fair to the kids, most aren’t taking a personal and individual policy stand because they simply can’t develop one of their own, they are merely operating on emotional reasoning or acting as extensions of the policy perspectives of their parents (or in the cases of parents who have ceded this aspect of child rearing to government school systems, the perspectives of their children’s teachers).
Often, the first criticism of the non-Marxist by the Marxist is that they aren’t “paying their fair share”, “doing their part”, or some other trope designed to indicate that in the view of the Marxist, the non-Marxist is not contributing enough of their time, treasure, or efforts to the collective “cause”.
That’s the Marxist argument for masking – you must wear a mask, not to protect yourself, you must wear a mask to protect everyone else regardless of if masks are proven to work or not. What matters is your compliance, not the success of the practice.
In a free, capitalist society, individuals are free to contribute whatever and however they wish to any collective – if, and only if, that collective is successful in meeting the needs, wants and desires of that individual. A Marxist society demands that contribution regardless of the success of the collective in successfully delivering that outcome.
We like to think that America is not a Marxist state – and by strict definition, it is not – but there is a myriad of examples where this Marxist ideal of forced association are at work within our culture and our communities.
Perhaps there is no single better example than our schools. American Christians are forced to send their children to Government schools that denigrate Christianity and its practice even as they glorify and attempt to mainstream other religions and promote views contrary to Christian teachings. Children are exposed to subjects of sexual behaviors and practices that many parents feel are not age-appropriate subjects or are subjects better addressed by a parent than a teacher and racism is institutionalized in the form of Critical Race Theory.
On the scale of least to most destructive instruction, mandatory masking seems trivial when compared to the aforementioned, at least until one realizes such small processes are just gateway drugs to more radically coercive behaviors and policies.
Nonsensical programs like Common Core tried to complicate and convolute simple learning practices while catering to the least common denominator. Parents have been arrested for refusing to allow their children to take standardized tests – and have been accused of trespassing for showing up at the school to attend to their children or school board meetings to defend them. Parents often have no rights to know what and how their children are being taught once the kids enter the school door – the kids are often treated as state property.
The 2013 clip of then MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry is making the rounds again, in which she says:
“So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
The pandemic and the resulting remote, online delivery of instructions opened the eyes of parents to the indoctrination to which their kids are subjected – right under their noses. People are waking up to the real possibility that schools have long been little more than Marxist incubators.
Sad, really, to see young Americans protesting in favor of coercive mandates. My peers (from my high school days of the mid/late 70’s) were interested in more freedom, not less.
My, how times have changed.