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Tricks Up Their Sleeves
My family spent this past Christmas at a resort in the red part of a blue state. There was much fuss about masking and vaccination status at check-in, and many signs mandating masks indoors for the vaccinated and masks everywhere for the un-. But in actual practice, nobody cared. Some folks were masked, some were not, and I witnessed no conflicts between the two.
It seemed like a joyful sign that yes, we can all get along, and everything was going to be all right. Then one afternoon, we attended a magic show in the main auditorium, and things got grinchy.
At one point, the magician called maybe ten young children up onto the stage. These kiddos were 100 percent masked, which caused a problem for the magician, whose act depended on banter. He’d put a microphone in a kid’s masked face, the kid would say something muffled, he’d tell the kid to pull the mask down, the kid reluctantly would, and then after speaking, the kid would quickly pull the mask back up.
Every kid. Every time.
You’d think the excitement of being on vacation, being onstage, being in the presence of a magician, being part of his act, would make kids eager to drop the masks. But nope. They were well-trained. Indoctrinated, even.
It was the most joyless magic show I’ve ever seen.
I have a friend who works in an elementary school, and she’s been telling me how they do lunch these days. The kids sit across from each other at cafeteria tables, just like old times. But one side of the table stays masked while the other side eats. The eaters have ten minutes to finish their food, then it’s their turn to mask up and silently watch their classmates chow down.
That’s horrifying, right? What adult would tolerate that? Honestly?
We hear a lot about kids being resilient, but that’s not really what’s at play here. What makes all this possible is that kids are adaptable and will learn to live with even abusive conditions if the adults who create their reality demand it.
This would be depressing enough with just the masks. But add in all the social reordering that educators seem determined to make happen by making it our children’s reality, and the masks start to look like quaint accessories.
Wish we could find a magician to stuff all this crap back in a hat and wand it away. Not sure how else it disappears.
Published in Education
Masking these children takes all the joy out of life in general . . .
I’ve lost track of all the wrong guesses I’ve made about Wu’Flu. Maybe every single one of them has been wrong. Among them was the idea that kids would resist the foolish impositions. Nope – I still see ’em masked, even outdoors and well away from school. I never imagined that kids would be so adaptable.
Despite batting .000, I am going to make another guess about the pandemic/panic: years from now, the parents of these kids will be proud of what they inflicted. The damage was (they will say) worth it. This disease was so bad, nothing could be worse. The parents will cast themselves as heroes, and their willingness to sacrifice anything, including their kids, proves it.
If they even concede that damage was done. They may not.
Yes. It is criminal how the parents have terrorized these children into this behavior.
I assume this is a rhetorical question, but the adults don’t tolerate this, they happily go along with it – even to the point of indoctrination, as you say.
Mass formation psychosis.
It disappears when we make it disappear.
Welcome Terri! It’s wonderful to have you here!
Our youngest (14yr old) who is vaccinated and had what I suspect is the Omicron variant because it was just after Christmas, was annoyingly fastidious about wearing the damn thing. He’s finally started to give it a rest. I’m saddened at the percentage of kids that seem to have no problem with it. Worried about the type of compliant generations of kids that have been produced.
Our kids know how I’ve felt about this farce from the beginning. I’ve been embarrassed to go into a store where I’m unmasked, and he is. I fully intend to remind (tease the hell out of) him when the public policy disaster that was inflicted on the world is widely accepted.
Yeah, I had that idea too. My kids are long out of school, thank goodness, but I still believe they’d have needed a glue gun and handcuffs to keep a mask on my son, and even then, he’d have given them a run for their money. I’d just assumed that kids in general would be displeased. But from what I’ve heard and seen, they’re mostly compliant. It’s heartbreaking, and scary as hell.
I’m inclined to blame the schools, but certainly, many many parents are feeding into this brainwashing. Whereas if my kids were in school today, I would be on a terrorist watch list for sure.
I was thinking of whether they’d tolerate it for themselves, which of course they would not. But then, adults have always been all about do as I say not as I do.
Thank you! Wonderful to be here!
For them to ever concede that they did anything wrong would be to admit that the people who listened to Rush/voted for Trump/support DeSantis/defend Joe Rogan/etc were ever right about anything, and this will never happen. Ever.
Did I miss something?
Exactly what I’m seeing with my 11-year-old grandson and his friends. These are truly wonderful kids whose trust we are abusing. They will either cling to the myth throughout their lives, or they will be really really angry when they find out that people were not completely honest with them.
I can’t imagine how this ends.
I’m really upset with the education industry. What have they done?
Having spent a lot of time in public schools as a volunteer, I can say with certainty that, contrary to adults’ myths about kids, kids actually need to be encouraged to smile and socialize. I used to tell administrators that kids are actually pretty fearful and need reassurance most of all. We need to tone down the discipline stuff and focus on encouragement and optimism for the future.
I’m not at all surprised to see many kids avoiding risky social contact in which they might experience some rejection from a peer. For some kids, the social development they need most of all from school is not going to happen. They aren’t going to engage other kids unless it’s easy to do it. Take that easy interaction off the table and they will stay happily in their shell.
Psychiatrist Mark McDonald, author of The United States of Fear, has written a letter to the parents of his young patients stating that they are not to bring their children to his office masked because it is “child abuse,” and in a comment on this letter, he points out that “[p]hysicians are mandated reporters. When we witness or suspect child abuse, we are obligated both ethically and legally to report it to social services or the police. If a child shows up for therapy or medication treatment covered with cigarette burns, a doctor cannot ignore it. Masks are no different. They may not leave physical scars (although they often result in painful skin infections that can lead to permanent facial disfigurement), but they do cause significant and possibly permanent damage to a child’s brain, retarding speech and language development, crippling social skills, and inciting a vicious cycle of emotional dysregulation leading to major depression, self-harm, and substance abuse. We would never allow someone to do this to our children directly, so why do we condone it through the vehicle of a facemask?”
You can read his letter here:https://aflds.org/news/post/psychiatrist-bans-child-masking-and-all-forms-of-child-abuse-in-his-practice/
I have sympathy but it’s difficult to be objective because I despise magicians, especially the ones who perform for children.
I’ve worked with many (I was a juggler years ago).There are some magicians who I like, but it’s because they make fun of other magicians.
Yeah, we probably wouldn’t have gone if we’d realized it was a children’s magician (as we should have, since the show was at 3 p.m., but this is what happens when you have too much free time). It was already pretty pathetic before the little masked zombies took the stage …
All the while disregarding the fact that young children are a virtually no risk of contracting the virus.
Yep, it’s utterly infuriating.
In the early days of the pandemic, when it was all about school closure and remote learning, I remember thinking, This is going to be devastating for kids who are social and popular and involved. But for the kids who do well academically but struggle socially, this is going to be paradise. They are not going to want to go back.
I guess the masks also offer some ability to withdraw, but I wonder. Alpha girls gonna alpha girl—are there masks that make you cool and masks that make you ew? Are kids who can tolerate masks shaming those who fidget? If your mom is the one who was yelling about masks at the PTA meeting, is there some social disgrace waiting for you the next morning? When you can no longer hug your teacher or huddle with your friend at recess or take a breath of fresh air without killing Grandma, I worry that only the bad social stuff survives.
The rancid icing on a rotten cake.
It’s good to see a professional who works with children sticking up for children. More frequently, we see people who absolutely positively know better acting like it’s all NBD. Saw a story about a three-year-old getting kicked out of speech therapy for not wearing a mask and wanted to scream. You cannot do early intervention speech therapy with masks on. Stop it! But this is more the rule than the exception, alas.
Congrats to Dr. McDonald for saying so forcefully what absolutely everybody knows. But he should probably go take all his money out of banks now.
In 10-15 years (and in some cases less) these kids will be eligible to vote. All the Mayor Petes and the Prime Minister Justins are licking their chops at the possibilities the rising generation offers them.
‘Children are resilient’ is the lie we tell ourselves to justify the traumas we put them through.
This article will horrify you.
A Partial List of the Myriad Abuses That Facemasks Inflict on Our Children
Courtesy of Joe Messerli at PoliticallyIncorrectHumor.com. Sign up for his free daily newsletter to get more like this. I use his stuff on my personal blog all the time. (RushBabe49.com)
Will reblog over at RushBabe49.com.
Hey, Terri, I neglected to welcome you to Ricochet. You will find the most wonderful new family you didn’t know you had!
Thanks! Been lurking for a while, nice to finally be in the mix!
Jim, I don’t think that this is correct. I think that kids can get the virus quite easily. They are at virtually no risk of death, or of a serious case. It’s a minor ailment for virtually all kids.
I actually think that it’s a good thing for kids to obey their elders.
I think it’s a bad thing that so many of the elders are fools.
Would be helpful if elders saw that as a weighty responsibility and not a convenience.
And if they’d give kids a consistent message. When kids are getting different instructions from elders at home and elders at school, they’re in a bit of a pickle.