FACE MASK NOT REQUIRED

Parents are protesting. Children are suffering. Children are dying.

It’s not a pleasant experience writing about children dying from Covid.

A simple act of using commonsense, coupled with some adult responsibility, on the part of parents, would have me, focusing on children surviving the pandemic because they masked up.

It ain’t pretty to write about parents protesting against mask mandates for their school-age children when it’s such a small and simple act of protection.

More unsettling is the pain of recognizing the number of parents who will be s buying caskets for their young ones, this year, after having bought the traditional back-to-school clothes and supplies.

Coffins instead of clothes?

I was forced into asking the young mother to repeat what she’d just said to me. Not physically pushed into doing so, but my mental anguish took hold.

“What?”

She said it again.

“My kid can’t learn wearing a mask and no one can force me to make him wear one,”

I learned a much-needed lesson: don’t smile at people in line at the check-out counter. These are crazy times and crazy times produce crazy people.

Maybe, I should have let it be. Why was I so foolish as to think I could hear sense out of nonsense?

It was too late to try second-guessing myself. I was stuck interacting with this young peddler of death.

Like most parents, don’t these anti-maskers expect their children to respect authority?

 Or, when driving, do our parent protesters run a red light because “ain’t nobody gonna tell me what to do?”

I received an email from someone my age (I suspect she was my age based on her disconnect with the world of today’s parents.)

The writer was wondering, she wrote, what was wrong with the young parents in her family who aren’t able to figure out, for themselves, whether or not to send their kids to school and whether they should wear masks, and to top it off, she wrote, the parents are depending on the ‘higher-ups’ to tell them- not Jesus she was quick to add – but governors, school board members and everybody else with a so-called title.

Sellers of caskets aren’t running any back-to-school-specials. These fancy burial boxes with comfortable-looking padded fleece inside upholstery don’t come cheap.

Whether the grieving family is going for wood, metal, or high-end, the cost of a coffin, most likely, isn’t part of their back-to-school shopping budget.