If you’re too mad to think straight, it’s best to sleep on it before you say anything. But what if you wake up the next day, madder than you were before?
This is where Arkansas parents find themselves this Friday morning, their children’s health dangling over the hungry maws of a runaway rightwing legislature apparently happy to feed on the young. The liberty of Arkansans to kill and be killed, whether by gun or by deadly virus, shall not be infringed. That’s the real message behind the anodyne talking points of “personal responsibility” and “personal decision-making.”
Governor Hutchinson announced Thursday a special session to revisit allowing mask mandates in schools. He did so coolly, making his case with charts and graphs and numbers. He stayed the course on his strategy of trying to cajole the toddler tantrum caucus, who so clearly takes pleasure in doing the opposite of whatever he says. Any mom can tell you the time for tough love was months ago. Hutchinson’s strategy didn’t work during the legislative session, and no one knows if it will work now.
Some had hoped the governor would use executive powers here, that he could issue a mask mandate for schools as he did for the entire state last year. But Hutchinson said he got legal advice that making such a change unilaterally is beyond his power. That’s debatable, and might be worth a court challenge, depending on which lawyer you ask.
For now, the fix Hutchinson is gunning for is low-impact, with plenty of wiggle room for anti-maskers still bent on self-destruction. Districts in counties where transmission is low (currently nowhere in Arkansas meets that criteria) or where school leaders simply don’t feel like it wouldn’t have to require masks in class. Arkansas school boards would maintain local control to save children’s lives, or to not, whatever they see fit.
The worst-case scenario is our current one, in which school boards don’t even have a choice. If nothing changes, school administrators will be powerless to add masks to their dress codes.
An already monstrous hurricane of anti-intellectual resentment picked up velocity this week as it spun from El Dorado to Ozark to Russellville. In South Arkansas, Arkansas’s most virulent senator pitched one of his sniveling, walleyed fits. On the defensive as the author of a law that’s so bad the governor is calling everyone back to town to try to fix it, Trent Garner (R-El Dorado) threatened to turn the special session into a new opportunity to own the libs. His wish list includes forbidding the teaching of historic truths (critical race theory), defunding traditional schools in favor of charters and vouchers so parents with the resources can flee to snootier ground, and attacking teachers’ unions. Sen. Bob Ballinger (R-Ozark) weighed in from St. Louis on his trip to the ALEC conference, apparently gleeful that so far, Hutchinson doesn’t have the votes. Russellville and Jonesboro lawmakers said they’ll make sure it stays that way.
As with everything COVID-related, this debate is likely to look completely different tomorrow, reshaped by new discoveries or better potential fixes (or worsening death counts or new variants). What Senate leader Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) and House leader Matthew Shepherd (R-El Dorado) are now calling a heavy lift might lighten as death counts rise.
On Thursday Hutchinson announced that COVID-19 latched on to 2,843 more Arkansans in the last 24 hours, and killed 11 more people in the state. The number of people hospitalized was down nine, but is that really something to celebrate when it could simply mean that those folks have moved from a hospital bed to the morgue? More than 6,000 Arkansans are already in their graves, including two children. Fetuses are dying when pregnant women get infected. Everyone knows someone who has buried a family member. It’s not getting better.
Dr. José Romero said Thursday he expects children under 12 still have months to wait before they’re eligible for vaccines, meaning masks are still the only tools we have for them.
As it currently stands two weeks before the first day of school, you can send your own kids in masks as long as you understand that their unmasked classmates’ freedom to infect everyone around them is a God-given right. So hurl your own children into the fray, or don’t, if you have the resources and the means. My own boys will be there, wide-eyed and double-masked. While this is a choice I resent having to make, Arkansas politicians will tell you it’s a simple question of personal decision-making and personal responsibility.