A smile in the darkness

Once lockdowns eventually finished and children were allowed back to school, panics frequently broke out concerning children and their potential to spread covid. A consequence of this was a government direction for children above a certain age to wear masks in their classrooms. It wasn’t a requirement per se. It was one of those nasty, Machiavellian pieces of work where they told you that you could do as you pleased. In this case, wear a mask or don’t. Only the government put all their weight and propaganda behind mask wearing. All sorts of evils would befall you and the ones you loved if you didn’t. So virtually all the children at the school my son attended wore masks in the classroom. Not in the playground though. It was important to wear a mask indoors but outdoors you didn’t need to. This, of course, made no sense because adults at the same time were wearing masks everywhere, indoors and out. Like everything else about the Covid response it was maddeningly arbitrary, inconsistent, cruel and, as it turned out, ineffectual. I told my son that he wasn’t to wear a mask to school. I wasn’t wearing one myself either. I knew it made little to no difference and caused its own harms. I didn’t want to encourage delusion. And I didn’t want my son psychologically scarred by having to wear one. I didn’t want him having to breathe that sickening recycled air for hours every day in a hot classroom. It was the right call but also a very tough one because he would naturally be attacked by his peers. Inevitably he was bullied within days. But, as time went on, and he didn’t yield, his peers learnt to accept it. One of the proudest moments of my life was my son going off to a school of children, almost all wearing pointless surgical masks, and him not doing so. Head held high. Photos of him in class surrounded by sad, shrouded faces and his beaming little smile shining out through the darkness. He stood his ground and in the end they just had to get over it. Eventually they stopped wearing masks as well. None of it made a jot of difference. And it was never spoken of again. Just another fruitless, destructive, ‘kind’ episode of the past few years.