“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
George Orwell – “Shooting an Elephant”
Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, one of my greatest fears has been that some people may never be able to return to normal life. While many of us have maintained our ability to connect with pre-2020 social standards, I recognize that the pandemic has fundamentally changed some people in seemingly permanent ways. This is to be expected of a pandemic, but it is concerning nonetheless. What will we look like when the dust settles?
In George Orwell’s short story “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), a British officer stationed in Burma kills a harmless elephant, despite not wanting to, because he perceives that the local people expect him to do it. His own conscience tells him to let the elephant live, but he yields to the pressure of others and does what he knows is not right. In the famous line “He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it,” Orwell describes how we slowly transform into different people when we wear the “mask” of others’ expectations.
How has COVID changed you?
Have you lived according to your own principles, or have you worn a mask of expectations?
In ReOpen Bucks, we’ve always tried to stay connected to who we were before the pandemic. We don’t want to forget that pre-2020 world. We don’t want a “new normal”. We’ve certainly been affected by the events of the past two years; who hasn’t? This turmoil has been hard on everyone. But our defining feature has always been our desire for normalcy.
Unfortunately, there is a small group of Bucks County community members who appear to be permanently changed by all this, and not for the better. They seem to always want COVID to be much worse than it is, and they want it to last forever. It has become their identifying feature. They’ve worn a mask, and their face has grown to fit it.
Last week I was made aware of a troubling development in a federal lawsuit against Central Bucks School District. In the case, captioned “H.T., individually and on behalf of a minor M.H., ET AL. v. CENTRAL BUCKS SCHOOL DISTRICT” (2:21-CV-03846), the plaintiffs have asked the federal court to compel Central Bucks to enforce strict CDC mitigation parameters, including universal masking with no exceptions. While the existence of the lawsuit is not particularly surprising, a motion submitted by the plaintiffs ought to shock every parent in the school district.
On October 15, the plaintiffs submitted a Motion for Preliminary Injunction, which means they wanted the court to immediately force Central Bucks to do what they say. As exhibits to their motion, they submitted dozens of still-frame images from security footage filmed in Central Bucks schools, which they obtained from the district through the discovery process. The images depict hundreds of students and staff, both masked and unmasked, in an attempt to prove that the district is doing something wrong. The plaintiffs felt fully justified in submitting these exhibits to the court, thereby making them a permanent part of the public record and downloadable by anybody on PACER.
Stop and think about that. A few community members are so desperate to force the district to stop allowing mask exceptions that they’re willing to throw children as young as kindergarten into public purview. Imagine if these images included your child. Would that be okay with you? Is it okay with you that security cameras meant to protect children are now being used to spy on them?
The lawsuit’s fundraiser, Dr. Susan Lipson, has been a consistent advocate for a lot of the COVID mitigation that has been proven worthless. On October 16th she provided the following update to the lawsuit’s followers:
She openly acknowledges that the injunction filing has put these hundreds of kids (all of whom are easily identifiable) into the public record. She also refers to the images as “disturbing evidence”. When you’ve reached the point where looking at normal kids in normal school is “disturbing” to you, it’s probably time for some self-reflection, to see if your face has grown to fit your mask.
A couple days ago, the situation in Central Bucks took any even more sinister turn. Gayman Elementary School in Doylestown experienced what is being called an “outbreak” by the Courier Times. Let me highlight a few eyebrow-raising quotes from the Courier’s article:
“A deluge of phone calls, emails and online messages were made to this news organization Friday morning from parents … most of whom wished to have their names withheld from this story…”
Hmmmm, something tells me right off the bat this is not organic. Parents were beating down the door to get this covered by the Courier, but not willing to use their names? Okay. I’ve been advocating for everyone in the community to use their names so that we can have honest conversations. How can we have an honest conversation about Gayman Elementary when we don’t know who the “deluge” of calls and messages is coming from, and we don’t know what their motives are?
“Most of the parents of children with positive tests say their children have been asymptomatic…”
Well, duh. For the billionth time, kids are barely affected. So people are freaking out about what, exactly?
“Most cases among students have been mild or asymptomatic this week, but one parent said her daughter was in significant pain after testing positive earlier this week. … That student, a fifth-grader, came home with a headache and fever on Tuesday.”
Anyone who knows me knows that I always advocate to put kids first. So the last thing I intend to do is belittle a child’s suffering. But when we get to the point where we have to shut society down, including schools, to avoid any child from ever getting a headache or a fever…do you think maybe we’ve gone too far? Talk about moving the goalposts. How are kids ever supposed to have a normal educational experience when this is the standard? Consider that out of the entire Gayman Elementary “outbreak”, this was the worst example of symptoms that the Courier found. A headache and fever. 🤦♂️
So how did this “outbreak” come about?
Why have other CBSD schools been spared, including the high schools which have many more unmasked students?
Why Gayman Elementary?
And what does this mean for the school moving forward?
First and foremost, CBSD fortunately has a very protective Health & Safety Plan which should keep the kids in school. The Plan instructs the district to implement some changes for the next week, including removal of mask exceptions and increased social distancing where possible. The plan does allow the administration to completely shut down classrooms and even the whole school if deemed appropriate by the Bucks County Health Department, but my understanding is that so far Central Bucks intends to keep these kids in school. That’s a great thing.
In terms of what will come of the COVID “outbreak”, we don’t have to look very far to find reassurance. Just twenty minutes away at Maureen Welch Elementary in Council Rock School District, an eerily similar “outbreak” occurred a few weeks ago. It was ultimately determined that the “outbreaks” there were caused by: 1) a teacher who was fully vaccinated and always masked infected several of her students, and 2) several students caught the virus at a trampoline party outside of school.
The “outbreak” was met with doom and gloom and relentless wailing at the time. Based on the hysteria that people were putting out, you’d have thought Maureen Welch Elementary was replaced by a giant asteroid crater. And yet, miraculously….nothing happened. Some kids got sniffles. Maybe a fever here or there. They recovered. And look at Maureen Welch Elementary now:
Now for the big question: Why Gayman Elementary? The answer appears to be surprisingly simple. They wore a mask, and their face grew to fit it.
Gayman Elementary’s Home & School Association (it’s like the PTO) is run by President Jen Kanyok and Vice President Kristin Jones. As the leaders of the school’s HSA, they have a pretty good sphere of influence within the school community. Ms. Kanyok (Jen Marie on Facebook) used that influence in the “Gayman Elementary Parents” group to urge all parents to get their kids tested even if they don’t have any symptoms.
Consider this moment, especially from the perspective of the students at Gayman Elementary. This is an adult (predisposed to COVID hysteria–more on that in a minute) with a lot of influence urging parents to test perfectly healthy children. Imagine being a healthy kid, ready for whatever is on your kid calendar today, and your world has to stop because you may be carrying some viral fragments that obviously aren’t much of a threat to you.
What happened next is sadly predictable. Many parents readily accepted the panic and rushed to test their perfectly healthy children. Morbid curiosity took over. Before you know it, there were dozens of parents reporting positive cases. According to the times article, the worst actual symptom (so far, knock on wood) was a headache and a fever. Dozens of “cases”, not much of any illness.
And so Gayman Elementary became home to an “outbreak”, largely driven by Ms. Kanyok’s influence.
To give you a frame of reference for what Ms. Kanyok (HSA President) and Ms. Jones (HSA Vice President) believe, here are a couple of their social media “likes” (I’ve redacted the irrelevant ones). Both of them like the page “Lady Whistletown’s Bucks County Tea“, an anonymous account which strongly criticizes Central Bucks for not having enough COVID mitigation, and they both follow “CBSD Neighbors United“, the Democrat candidates for Central Bucks School Board whose primary campaign platform has been that Central Bucks needs to strictly abide by CDC guidelines with no exceptions.
Obviously, I hope it goes without saying that everyone in our community is entitled to their beliefs and opinions. I’m not writing this to accuse Ms. Kanyok or Ms. Jones of having any ill intention. I’m sure they’re both lovely people. But it seems fairly obvious that their beliefs about COVID have burdened them with certain expectations. Without realizing it, they’ve allowed those expectations to result in harm to children.
First they wanted to get the school, or at least classrooms, shut down completely. Plenty of people in the community are still pushing hard for that to happen. Thankfully, CBSD has every intention of keeping the school open (at least for now). So when that didn’t work, they resorted to taking away the school’s outdoor Trunk-or-Treat (which belongs to the HSA, so it was theirs to cancel).
I’m sure this seems like small peanuts to many of you reading this, and sure, I’ll admit that it’s not the end of the world. It’s just a Trunk-or-Treat. But I am getting sick and tired of seeing kids being made to miss out on happy, fun things time and time and time again. It’s really starting to wear me down. Why can’t healthy kids just be left alone to live their lives and grow?
In fact, I’d go further by asking, what does cancelling the Trunk-or-Treat even accomplish? From a pure epidemiological perspective, it’s hard for me to imagine some sort of Public Health benefit from the decision. It’s an outdoor event, where COVID transmission is virtually impossible, and all sick people can be encouraged to stay home. Even if there were some miraculous transmission at the event, who would it harm? All of the kids testing positive have been either completely asymptomatic or mild. So it isn’t threatening kids. Adults in their families now have the option of being not only fully vaccinated, but fully vaccinated PLUS boosted. So it isn’t threatening adults. Who exactly was this decision made to protect? It makes no sense.
But what does make perfect sense to me is the weight of expectations felt by Ms. Kanyok and Ms. Jones. They have a belief system, and that belief system put a mask on their faces. Their faces grew to fit it.
The element of Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” that I love the most is that the officer never lost his own sense of self. Throughout the whole story, all the way to the end, he was cognizant of the disparity between his conscience and his actions. I like that aspect of intellectual honesty and self-reflection.
In contrast, many people in Bucks County have been wearing their masks for so long now that they don’t even realize how much they’ve changed. Their exposure to droning, zombie-like catch phrases (“follow the science“, “trust the experts“, “keep you safe and healthy“) has been so totalitarian in nature that I almost can’t blame them. It’s as if living in COVID world has become their new normal. Somewhere along the way, they lost sight of what matters.
For example, consider this mailer in which Central Bucks Board Candidate Dr. Mariam Mahmud takes the cutting-edge position that children should be healthy. She builds an entire campaign platform around the idea that she must keep them healthy.
“We can count on Dr. Mariam to make sure our kids are going to school in a safe and healthy environment.“
But can we? If she had her way, Gayman Elementary would be shut down for two weeks. It’s hard to go to school in a safe and healthy environment when you aren’t going to school at all.
One interpretation could be that she wants to keep schools open by keeping them “safe”, AKA highly-mitigated. But that interpretation would reveal her to be highly ignorant, as school closures are happening everywhere, regardless of mitigation efforts. Just a couple weeks into the school year, ultra-mitigated Philadelphia had already shut down a bunch of schools. Several New Jersey school closures are cited in the same article. Los Angeles, despite utilizing every single mitigation measure imaginable, including universal testing and mandatory vaccination, has experienced outbreaks just the same. A simple google search will yield example after example after example of highly-mitigated school settings where an outbreak and resultant closure occurred. So what exactly is Dr. Mahmud’s platform? Mitigate forever, and then close the schools anyway? What is the goal?
Compare her message of endless, harmful health-and-safety-ism with an op-ed written by her opponent James Bender, titled Grownups Aren’t the Victims Here. The simplicity of his message is astounding. He says, “I firmly believe the answer lies in finding every possible solution that leads us closer to providing kids with a normal school experience.“
Normal school; imagine that.
Think back to Gayman Elementary and the harm that was caused for nothing. We didn’t need to test all those perfectly healthy kids–that accomplished nothing. We didn’t need to cancel the Trunk-or-Treat–that accomplished nothing. We didn’t need to burden children with ever-increasing anxiety about a virus that leaves them overwhelmingly asymptomatic, and in one case yields a headache and fever. When are we ever going to stop acting according to unreasonable expectations, and start giving the kids their lives back?
To wrap up, let’s consider the examples we’ve covered so far. All three examples result in real-world harm, whether that’s intentional or not.
- We have adults spying on children with school security cameras, and then posting images of them to the public record.
- We have adults fear-mongering about an “outbreak” in which virtually everyone is healthy.
- We have School Board candidates promising to take away what little normalcy children currently have and then close the schools anyway when their beloved plans don’t work.
I want to reiterate my sincere belief that none of the people associated with those three examples are inherently bad people. I want to believe–I have to believe–that everyone in our community cares. People are inherently good.
But it seems self-evident that in each of those examples the adults are acting upon perceived expectations rather than stepping back and asking “is this the right thing to do?” And that worries me. I’ve fallen into that trap before, leading to my use of language that I regret and am now regularly attacked for. It’s the same trap that has led community members to send death threats to School Board Directors, hit people over the head, mock the speech of a deaf person, attack a school principal for simply caring about his students, etc. etc.
I asked at the beginning of this article, what will we look like when the dust settles? As time goes by, I become increasingly concerned that these people may be permanently changed. They may be chasing COVID’s ghosts forever. What are their exit ramps? How do they return to a life where a headache and fever is not the end of the world? It makes me sad to ponder.
They’ve worn a mask, and their face has grown to fit it.
