Alonzo Frank Palm Beach Gardens
When you give COVID-19 mask protesters a kvetching opportunity, you soon discover that for many, it's really not about the mask.
Complaining about wearing a mask is just an opportunity for them to put on their "patriot" attire, dust off their Nazi references and imagine themselves as God-anointed, heroic figures in American history.
The Palm Beach County School Board activated this underwhelming stew of humanity again this past week while discussing the mask-wearing policy in schools for this summer and the upcoming fall term.
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The anti-maskers showed up in force to counter Dr. Alina Alonso, the director of the state Health Department's Palm Beach County office, who had urged the board to follow CDC guidelines, and keep mask requirements in the fall for students who still haven't been vaccinated by then.
Stay the course on masks, Alonso urges
A spike of 15 percent of the new COVID-19 infections in the county are happening now to children who are between the ages of 5 and 14, Alonso told the board members.
"We're nowhere near the numbers where we need to be for the younger age group, and those are the people who are actually getting the new cases," Alonso said.
She said the good news is that vaccinations might be available for children in that age group soon – which drew a round of boos from the audience.
You see, the people who are against wearing masks are often against getting vaccinated, too. They imagine it is their God-given right to send their kids, unvaccinated and unmasked, to public schools, where they will be entitled to put other kids and their family members on freedom-ventilators.
As for Alonso, the anti-maskers have big plans for her.
"She is going to jail," Christopher Nelson told school board members during his time to speak during public comments.
Nelson, like many of the anti-maskers who showed up, was relegated to watching the meeting remotely from the school headquarters' cafeteria because he refused to comply with the mask requirement to be part of the audience in the meeting room.
Nelson wore a T-shirt proclaiming, "Masks are Slavery." He compared himself and the other anti-maskers in the cafeteria to Dr. Martin Luther King, and the struggles against government-mandated segregation during the civil rights movement.
That might not have been the most bizarre thing Nelson said. He also referred to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as "this little scumbag," and mocked the people who complain about anti-maskers like him.
"Where's the people who harass us in stores, who call the snitch line on us?" Nelson said. "The people who make our lives a living hell."
The Bible comes out in the debate
Speaking of a living hell, Nelson wrapped up his performance by brandishing a Bible, and citing it as his authoritative source for mask policies.
"You read the medical papers, but I don't think you read this," he told the school board members. "It's called the Bible."
Nelson then read a verse from Matthew that he imagined was on point:
"But who shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea," it reads.
If I were going to get all biblical about mask laws, that hardly seems to be the controlling verse. Not when you have this one from Romans:
"Obey the government, for God is the One who has put it there. There is no government anywhere that God has not placed in power," it reads.
In other words, shut thy sanctimonious pie hole, ye insufferable mask-hole.
Nelson's descent into Christianity run amok had lots of company.
One speaker, Joey Soto, who doesn't even have a child in the school district, waited for more than a hour to tell the school board, "This is a spiritual war and whether you know it or not, God wins."
Another speaker told the school board members that they "let all the demons out of Hades" with the mask policy.
And yet another, a woman whose children are not in the public schools, managed to segue from masks, to God, to complaints about the school system's equity principle, which is geared toward the laudable goal of dismantling systems of racial oppression or inequality in education.
"Stop this white crap (expletive)," the white woman told board members. "We should not be ashamed for what the color of our skin looks like. … We are children of God. Jesus, help us, because the way you are controlling these situations is terrible."
(Jesus wept.)
Other speakers seamlessly transitioned into complaints about standardized testing, the Mexican border, "anti-Americanism and sex education indoctrination programming" and colloquies about how fresh air and Vitamin C keeps the COVID away.
It was like a Trump rally without Trump.
Comments turn to personal threats
And when they weren't counting on divine retribution, they fantasized out loud about imaginary criminal trials against school board members who mandated mask wearing.
"You will be judged one day, just like those Nazi generals that my grandfather had to spill blood for me to be speaking today," one cafeteria-banished speaker warned board members.
Another speaker warned the board members: "Put your money in a trust fund because we're coming after your money."
Political hopeful Melissa Martz used the mask issue as a way to leverage political support for a campaign for Congress.
"Remove your children from the care of these Nazis," she said.
And like so many other speakers, she threatened the school board members.
"You should each be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," she told them. "I am aware of law firms who are pursuing this right now as we speak."
Back in the real world, Alonso praised school board members for doing a good job in adopting policies that were keeping schoolchildren safe and helping the county to reduce the spread of the deadly virus while just 45.2 percent of county residents to date have been fully vaccinated.
To quote the words of that great mask-policy icon, Martin Luther King:
"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
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@FranklyFlorida
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Source: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/05/22/covid-mask-critics-abusing-school-board-public-comments-hell/5202866001/