‘SNL’ Now Thinks Covid Hysteria Is Funny. It isn’t.
For nearly two years we’ve listened to our elected officials and media commentators prattle on about how they are fighting COVID the right way and then mock Florida as some sort of Covid hellscape. They wanted us to believe that Florida was poorly governed and full of right wing rubes who were too stupid and selfish to care about the pandemic.
But last week the Democratic Governors Association held its annual meeting. Can you guess where?
Bingo. The sunny state of Florida. Palm Beach to be exact. Students, teachers and food service workers remained masked back at home.
I guess all the pols from blue states who couldn’t wait to enjoy a cocktail under the shade of a palm tree didn’t really mean it when they lambasted Florida’s lack of restrictions and jumped on the Ron DeathSantis bandwagon. No wonder Florida’s economy is booming—even the elected officials who lock down their own states and cover the faces of children for two years jump at the chance to visit the free state of Florida.
Students in the Sunshine State have been able to breathe freely at school and see their teachers' and classmates’ faces since the beginning of the school year. The students in my state of Rhode Island must wait until March 7th. We should have been the first state to make masks optional in schools—we are the most vaccinated state in the country, in case you haven’t heard. And the spike in transmission and serious illness that our department of health promised was inevitable without mask mandates? Yeah, that didn’t happen in Florida.
Even Saturday Night Live is done with the charade. The most recent episode—which could have easily aired a year ago— included a sketch about the mostly pointless and performative measures we have taken to “slow the spread.” Sure, it’s a relief to see some well deserved skewering of those who wanted to silence anyone who asked hard questions and refused to fall in line with whatever the CDC happened to be saying that day.
But it wasn’t funny.
People who had the very same doubts a year ago lost their jobs for speaking up. Many were suspended from social media platforms and accused of spreading misinformation. They saw friendships crash and burn.
Many, myself included, who opposed masks in schools school found ourselves on the receiving end of endless name-calling, often from strangers, sometimes from people we once called friends: dangerous, unhinged, alt-right, grandma killer, white supremacist, domestic terrorist, insurrectionist.
We knew cloth masks were nothing more than facial decorations and we were saying it long before CNN finally admitted it. We were confident in our conviction that the downside to masking children would prove far more disastrous than many realized and that the upside was basically non-existent.
We heard the warnings from speech therapists with more than 20 years experience about 3 and 4 year olds with poor muscle tone, unusual articulation errors, and excessive drooling. Young children, forced to cover their mouths and noses, missed two essential years of learning social cues through facial expressions. They can’t get those formative years back. And the two-year-olds, still in diapers and masked? A monstrous policy decision.
As state and federal leaders on team blue do 180s in unison, we keep hearing that “the science changed.” No it didn’t. The political science changed. Current polling portends a bloodbath for Democrats in the midterms and the dishonesty and politicization around COVID is one of the major reasons.
I’m certainly no political consultant but if I needed to earn back the trust of the people and ask for their vote, I’d start with an apology and a promise to never ever let it happen again.