Alternate title: Feel Free to Wear This Scarlet Letter, If That’s Your Personal Choice
I got the group text around 12:45 p.m. last Sunday. “Governor’s briefing at 2 p.m. today,” the message said. Instantly I was catapulted back to the early days of the pandemic, when then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s COVID briefings were a staple of my daily life as a school communications professional. The governor’s website only said it was a COVID-related press conference, but we all knew what was happening. “I’m p sure she’s gonna end the mask mandate for schools,” I texted a friend. “Wowowowowowowowow,” they responded.
As I listened to the governor confidently explain how we got here — how state officials had “followed the science” and “consulted with school leaders” — I felt the familiar discomfort of cognitive dissonance, like a pebble lodged in my mind. Didn’t we JUST buy KN95 masks because cloth masks weren’t good enough? Why are school leaders making public health decisions? What about preschool and kindergarten kids who can’t get vaccinated? What about my friends who are immune compromised or can’t get vaxxed?
I listened as the state’s top health official patiently explained that, while school districts could set their own rules about masking, the state really wanted that to be a county decision. I thought about my own county health department, which has been nothing short of heroic during the pandemic (and I’m sure I only know about a tiny fraction of what they’ve had to deal with), but also severely strained by everything that local health departments have been asked to do for the past two years.
I thought about how we stopped contact tracing in January and started asking people to self-report positive cases instead (pretty please) because local health authorities were so overtaxed. I thought about how the state sent a bunch of test kits to public schools and told schools to “distribute” them, without any direction or plan, because it should be a local decision. I thought about how my daughter came home with a test kit on a random Tuesday a few months ago, and when I asked her what it was for, she shrugged. We put the test in the medicine drawer; I figured we would need it eventually. But if I got sick or exposed to COVID before my daughter did, I’d be the one to use it, not her — which is, I’m sure, not what the school had in mind.
I thought about the rapid test kits that had arrived in the mail just a day or so earlier — the ones I had ordered back in January, because getting free test kits from the government meant ordering them from a website, rather than picking them up from a post office or a drugstore or a library, for some reason. I thought about the expensive reusable masks we had just bought, after being on a waiting list for months. I thought about CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s comment that masks are like “the scarlet letters of this pandemic” as I heard the governor and the state Department of Health reassure me that, of course, anyone who wants to wear a mask, for any reason, is more than welcome to do so.
Much like a 3-year-old, I’m not great with transitions, and like a lot of other people with anxiety, I like plans and I don’t like it when they change. So this, all of this — it’s hard for me. And a big part of that is just who I am as a person and I just have to deal with it.
But. But!
Underneath all my regular old garden-variety anxiety (which is screaming “NO NO NO NO THAT WASN’T THE PLAN” at the top of its lungs right now) is some old-fashioned, simmering anger. I’m angry that we have slid back down to the very quintessentially late-capitalism stage of this pandemic where we frame everything as personal choice and conveniently elide the fact that our choices impact our communities, and vice versa.
It’s true that anyone who “wants” to wear a mask can. Of course they can! But it’s also true that that’s not really the point. The point is not really about what I, personally, want to do. It can’t just be about that. If the only thing we talk about is what each of us, personally, wants to do, we lose sight of the big picture — the impact of our collective decisions. This, to my way of thinking, is what we have governments and school districts for: to zoom out and to look at how all of our personal decisions add up to form a big picture, and to think about whether that big picture looks OK, or if it’s no good.
I’m angry that we have slid back down to the stage of this pandemic where we frame everything as personal choice and conveniently elide the fact that our choices impact our communities, and vice versa.
I’m not saying we should have kept the mask mandate. Not necessarily. I’m not an epidemiologist or a public health expert, so I don’t know what to look for when I look at numbers of cases or available hospital beds or vaccination rates or any of that stuff. I really, really need to be able to rely on federal and state health officials to know when the time is right — and I probably can! On balance, it is probably OK in many or most instances for my vaccinated, low-risk family to stop wearing masks! But it would help me so, so much to think about those decisions — which are constant, and nuanced, and not all-or-nothing — in a meaningful way if this was being framed as “what’s best for your community” and not “what you, personally, feel like doing.”
Before school on March 2 — the first day of mask-optional school for my kid — we talked at breakfast about masks. About how there would probably be a mix of masked and unmasked people in her school, for a lot of different reasons. About how people might want to talk about why they are or are not wearing a mask, which is fine, but that it’s not OK to ask someone about their choice, because they can keep that private if they want to. We told my 10-year-old that, just like I can’t be there at recess time to tell her to wear her coat if it’s cold, she has to take responsibility for what she does with her mask. We talked about which situations are more or less likely to transmit COVID, like when people are close together or far apart.
And I told her that I wanted her to be able to decide what felt right for her, even if it was different than what her friends were doing. But all of it felt a little hollow. I wanted to be able to tell my 10-year-old that these decisions aren’t really about what we want, but about what we think is right: for us, for our families, for our schools and for our communities. Maybe I could have said that — maybe I should have said that — but I didn’t really know how.
Thank you in advance for not being a jerk about my personal mask feelings — I know it is a controversial topic! Which is really dumb because it should not be politicized! Anyway — I wanted to add a few links to the things I’ve enjoyed lately, because I’m trying to remember to do this. And I’d love, as always, to hear about something you’ve enjoyed recently.
What I’m reading: “Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools” by Monique Morris
What I’m listening to: Life on the Edge of Climate Change (Episode 1);