Throughout this whole pandemic, I think one of the biggest things that we as a nation have fumbled on has been political cohesion between our various levels of government. Whether it was Trump shrugging the virus off and thinking it would just “magically go away when it got warmer – around Easter!” or local governments dueling over safety precautions, we’ve never really had the whole lot of them on one unified place to confront this thing together, and at least for me that’s been incredibly frustrating.
Case in point – kids wearing masks in school.
Right now they’re a requirement for all kids in public schools in my community, however soon they might not be…
This is because yesterday my county rescinded their local mask mandate, leaving it up to local businesses to require masks on their own whim.
Today our Superintendent of schools reported that masks could be made optional in schools by the end of April. He later clarified that although he thought they should remain in place for the rest of the school year, because we no longer have a local mask ordinance in place, the school district is relying on our governor’s emergency order for the State of Florida to require masks in our schools.
That order, unless the governor chooses to extend it, expires at the end of April.
…the same governor who’s been on a tirade for the last week about how vaccine passports will never happen in Florida, despite support of the cruise industry who he’s also desperate to see re-open again…
It’s just scary because all across our country, we’re seeing safety procedures entirely played out along partisan lines – red governments at all levels think COVID is a bunch of baloney and want to see “everything back to normal” while blue governments are trying to keep restrictions in place. And as a result, instead of coming together and agreeing on how to address the pandemic, we’re left fighting among ourselves – people who want mask rules in place vs those who don’t, vaccine supporters vs anti-vaxxers, etc, etc…
From day to day, everything swings very delicately in this balance and it’s incredibly frustrating both waiting to see where the next card falls and also trying to figure out what we’ll do if the next changes aren’t along the lines that we’re hoping for.
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