Angry taxpaying parents and childless taxpayers Wednesday packed the Utah County Commission meeting in Provo, showing their fiery response to the state’s mask mandate for children returning to school.
In fact, the crowd -- composed mostly of people going (GASP!) maskless, and holding signs and informative documents exposing the uselessness of N95 masks against coronaviruses -- was so large, it flowed to the doors, and inspired two in the three-member Committee to “postpone” (that classic tactic of politicians and bureaucrats who want to drag-out proceedings in order to fatigue the opposition).
Reports ABC News:
The parents, some of whom carried signs condemning face masks, failed to sit in the marked seats and booed at the Utah County officials Wednesday night. The hearing was held over a letter by Utah County Commissioner Bill Lee, which asked Gov. Gary Herbert to waive his requirement kindergarten to 12th grade students wear a mask when schools reopen.
All of which reflects the way COVID19 “restrictions” have been used by politicians to restrict speech and attempts by Americans to appeal to government for redress of grievances – something the First Amendment supposedly insures.
If the politicians can restrict seating, or tell people they have to appear via “video”, they further limit the capacity of dissatisfied taxpayers to voice their grievances. Such action is no different than if the government required everyone to go through an obstacle course to leave their house prior to attending a government meeting, or to get tested for a virus every time they leave the home.
Moreover, the intensity of public opposition to Republican Governor Herbert’s mask edict sheds light on the deeper, systemic, problem of tax-funded, government-run schooling.
Just as the mask is controversial itself, it is a visual symbol of the inherent problem of collectivist schooling, which is what we have had in the US since the turn of the Twentieth Century. The issue is not just whether kids will be forced to wear masks for nearly seven hours a day, five days a week – on the busses and in the classrooms. The issue is whether kids will be subjected to ideas that run contrary to the principles and preferences of parents, and whether taxpayers – even those without kids – will be forced to pay for the promulgation of ideologies they find destructive.
Evidently, County Commissioner Tanner Ainge doesn’t understand this problem. He derided the residents filling the room, saying:
This is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing.
“We.," the preferred forced-inclusion pronoun of tyrants and bureaucrats, politicians and plunderers – who are usually one-and-the-same at various levels. “YOU” will be told, YOU will be “included” in the plural, wrapped in the arms of leviathan, and told its in your best interest.
The dissenter on the three-member Committee was Lee, who joined protesters outside the building to reiterate his call for the Governor to stop pushing local schools around.
All of which serves to highlight the collectivist mentality in action. The collectivist mindset holds that the individual and parents are incapable of handling their own lives and families, so the larger mass of the town (still composed of people that the collectivist assumes are incapable of handling their lives and families) must take over. But, of course, for the collectivist, that newly imposed collective is insufficient and might reflect differences from other towns, so the state collective (still composed of fallible humans) must be imposed.
But, predictably, the state is STILL insufficient in the eyes of the collectivist, and it might reveal differences and “inequality” when compared to other states, so… the nation-state must run things, and that line of thinking eventually leads to international rules and diktats from things like the UN.
And at each level, not only is information-gathering retarded, not only is bureaucracy increased, not only is addressability decreased even as special interest group power is INCREASED through lobbying, individual will is crushed.
The mask debate in Utah schools is about more than the unsubstantiated political claims that N95 masks are key protection against a virus that has seen a fatality rate in the range of a bad flu. That issue does raise the question of whether kids will ALWAYS be forced to wear masks in government schools, of course, but the larger issue is freedom.