5/4/2021 ERA OF LIGHT

A Georgia mom fed up with the state’s irrational and unscientific mask mandate for schoolchildren lectured the local school board in a recent video that speaks for millions of Americans.

“Every month I come here and I hear the same thing: Social, emotional health,” Courtney Ann Taylor told the Gwinnett County Board of Education on April 15th. “If you truly mean that you would end the mask requirement tonight. Tonight.”

“This is not March, 2020 anymore,” she continued. “We have three vaccines. Every adult in the state of Georgia that wants that vaccine is eligible to get it right now and every one of us knows that young children are not affected by this virus. They’re not. And that’s a blessing.

“But as the adults, what have we done with that blessing?” she asked, rhetorically. “We’ve shoved it to the side and we’ve said, we don’t care. You’re still going to wear a mask on your face every day, five and six year olds. You still can’t play together on the playground like normal children, seven and eight year olds. We don’t care,” she added, her voice cracking from emotion.

“We’re still going to force you to carry a burden that was never yours to carry,” she went on. “Shame on us. My six-year-old looks at me every month before I come here and she says: ‘Are you going to tell them tonight? Tell them I don’t want to wear this anymore.’ And I say, baby, it’s not time to fight that battle yet. I try to explain that there’s so many things, but it’s April 15th, 2021.”

“It’s time — take these masks off of my child!” she declared. Her remarks drew rousing applause from the parents in the audience.

“And I know what I’m going to be met with, but Ms. Taylor, the CDC, we did not vote for people at the CDC,” she continued. “We did elect leaders who do create policy. We elected the five of you. We chose you to make difficult decisions for our children. We chose you to make decisions that would be in our children’s best interests.”

“Forcing five, six, seven, eight, and nine year old little children to cover their noses in their mouths, where they breathe for seven hours a day, every day for the last nine months for a virus that you know, doesn’t affect them,” she continued, tearfully. “That is not in their best interest.”

“And this has to stop,” she added. “Defend our children. My six-year-old can’t come up here and say this. It has to stop. Take these off our children!”

The CDC’s latest figures show that there have been 266 COVID-19-related deaths from COVID-19 out of a population of 74.2 million young people since the pandemic began. This is a survival rate of 99.9997%.

In October, the Annual State of Mental Health in America showed that anxiety and depression nationwide had hit an all-time high, and was hitting ‘young people the hardest.’ Its key findings:

• Youth mental health is worsening: 9.7% of youth in the U.S. have severe major depression, compared to 9.2% in last year’s dataset. This rate was highest among youth who identify as more than one race, at 12.4%.
• Young people are struggling most with their mental health: The proportion of youth ages 11-17 who accessed screening was 9 percent higher than the average in 2019.
• Rates of suicidal ideation are highest among youth: In September 2020, over half of 11-17-year-olds reported having thoughts of suicide or self-harm more than half or nearly every day of the previous two weeks. From January to September 2020, 77,470 youth reported experiencing frequent suicidal ideation.

The mask mandates for America’s schoolchildren are far from “compassionate,” especially given that asymptomatic spread is rare and the vaccine efficacy rate is 99.992%. It’s time for the adults in the room to actually be the adults in the room.

“It has to stop. Take these off our children!” Hear, hear.

*By Kyle Becker