The facepalm before the storm

It's no secret that the redneck wingnuts are trying to take over public school boards everywhere, and not too far from Portland, they're succeeding. Teach little Johnny to be a good Christian soldier. Tear out the pages of history that don't fit the Fox News and QAnon narratives. 

Don't think for a minute that Justices Budweiser and Handmaid are going to stop them.

That being the case, nobody should be surprised that the Trumpy school board types are whining about the new state mandate that kids wear face masks in the schools when they go back in a few weeks. It's the same right-wing garbage that we've been hearing for the last year and a half, and it's neither worth repeating nor worth arguing with. Roughly 35 percent of America is stupid, racist, or both; what can you do?

But at this point, their complaint strikes me as particularly absurd, in that the Covid numbers in Oregon are so bad right now that it seems unlikely that we'll get to Halloween, or maybe even Labor Day for that matter, without a lockdown. Masks or no masks, the Delta variant seems poised to race through open grade schools like wildfire. And although the data isn't there yet, the anecdotes from the doctors in the hospitals are that the new Covid patients are "younger, sicker, quicker" than ever before.

There's no way children under 12 wll even begin to be vaccinated before Covid gets to a lot of them, and at a minimum, they will bring it home to their families, vaxxed or not. 

So I guess we can make a little note this week of the tighty-righties on the school boards and their annoying bleats about masks. But if the kids start checking into the hospitals, masks will be the least of everyone's problems.