MICHAEL BARONE: Returning to normalcy on school masks.
Are we returning to normalcy?
The word “normalcy,” as history buffs know, was used — but not invented — by our only journalist president, Warren G. Harding, to sum up his 1920 campaign. Normalcy was political shorthand for returning to normal times after a European war, prosecutions of peaceful protesters, sharp inflation and depression, terrorist bombings at home, totalitarian revolutions abroad and a pandemic influenza that killed, proportionately, more than twice as many Americans as COVID-19.
Normalcy was popular, too. Harding won the popular vote 60% to 34%, the largest percentage margin in history. The fighting ended; the economy grew; political protesters were pardoned; revolutionaries slumbered. Harding ushered in a decade of widespread prosperity, technological progress and Republican victories. The appeal of normalcy transcended even the most rigid of party lines.
Normalcy’s appeal is apparent now on the issue of masks in schools. Last week, the Washington Post ran an opinion article by three Massachusetts academic physicians arguing that masks in schools are no longer needed because the few adults at risk can protect themselves.
Masks at school are “an intervention that provides little discernible benefit,” chimed in an Atlantic article by three blue-state professionals. Mandatory masking “should end when coronavirus rates return to pre-Omicron levels,” wrote Brooklyn-based New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.
But there’s a huge group of leftist wine moms who will get a serious case of the vapors if and when that happens: “Jill Filipovic is a progressive writer who’s pro-mask but looking for an off-ramp from having to mask forever. She’s learned the hard way what happens when you share that view with a liberal crowd:”
On the other hand, as Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders used to say as a mantra, think of the children! Watch: The Moment One Elementary School Class Learned Their Mask Mandate Was Ending.
UPDATE: Leader Of California Teachers Union Insists On Masking Children, Attends Rams Game Maskless.
