We received a vivid preview Monday of legislative resistance to repealing the ban on mask mandates and letting local schools decide.
We heard that conservatives care only about protecting the children but that kids don't know how to use masks. We heard that the youngest kids tend to play with masks and share them. We heard that kids can't breathe in masks and that they end up with headaches. We heard that kids tend to make urine-stained and feces-stained messes of masks.
If Rep. Mary Bentley of Perryville gets to speak during the looming special legislative session--and it wouldn't be right to stop her--we'll likely hear that the best way to keep kids from catching the covid Delta variant is to give them healthy food and plenty of exercise.
That was the highlight of an afternoon's testimony at a joint meeting of the House and Senate health committees. That's unless you count Bentley's contention that there is great irony in that vaccinations are not yet approved by the FDA but get widely encouraged in the health-care industry while doctors won't engage in early treatments of active cases using experimental drugs.
Bentley's harangue was only marginally odder than what you could hear from dozens of her colleagues. In fact, one legislator followed up one of her questions to wonder how oxygen could penetrate masks but the virus could not. The answer is that oxygen molecules are tiny and droplets containing the virus are much bigger.
Bentley's and other legislative assertions were remarkable for their distrust of anything coming from public health officials and for their robust embrace of whatever it is these legislators have been reading, hearing and believing.
If the government and health officials say it, these legislators have heard something different and better.
On the receiving end of all of that was Dr. Jennifer Dillaha. She's the long-suffering medical director of the state Health Department who got yelled at last week in Mountain Home by people who didn't like her saying the truth that no data suggests that vaccines are sterilizing women.
Dillaha's reward for enduring primitive rudeness in Mountain Home was to field these questions from similarly informed but lower-volume legislators.
For the record, Dillaha responded that the vaccines have emergency authorization pending final approval but that nothing of that sort exists for the treatments Bentley was touting; that the state Health Department can't account for what doctors might or might not do in the way of treatment, but that those issues are studied and recommended on by national organizations, and that the advantage of masks is not their perfect usage by all children but the demonstrated general public-health benefit of keeping so many of these droplets from settling into so many noses to infect and spread.
The idea of masking is to build a wall with each of us a brick. It's to engage in shared public responsibility to slow the virus so that hospitals won't be overrun and we can lead normal lives going to jobs and educating our kids and rooting at football games.
That a cute little tyke just dropped his mask in the dirt on the playground and that another cute little tyke just stepped on it ... that's no reason to abandon efforts of shared responsibility. It's simply time for a new mask and an admonishment to be more careful.
Some elementary school kids might misuse a fire extinguisher. That doesn't mean fire extinguishers shouldn't be mandated for public schools.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.