Thread by @arthur_samuels

Today, like many others, I took the #masklikeakid challenge. Was it the worst experience of my life? No. It was annoying. The mask grew itchy & damp. I had to repeat myself so ppl could understand me. I was delighted to take it off when I was able to. Some thoughts: 1/X

As @appletozuchinni notes, it’s not truly possible to mask like a kid. I have agency. No one is going to yell at me if it slips. I know I can always stop doing this. I also don’t have sensory processing issues, auditory issues, or many other challenges that so many kids do. 2/X

But let’s set that aside for a moment. After today, I stand by my original statement. It’s like a pebble in your shoe. 3/x

https://twitter.com/arthur_samuels/status/1454102875156647947

So let’s do a cost/benefit of having a pebble in your shoe. Would you walk around with a pebble in your shoe for a day if it would save a life? Definitely. What about if there was a 50% chance it would? What about a 10% chance? 1%? 4/X

Would you walk around with a pebble in your shoe every day *for the rest of your life* if it would save a life? If there was a 50% chance it would? A 10% chance? Would you ask your children to have a pebble in their shoe every day for their whole lives to save one person? 5/X

And does your analysis change if the person whose life you are saving has other life-saving measures available to them that don’t require your child’s suffering? I would imagine it does. 6/X

We need to acknowledge these tradeoffs. I suspect almost all of us would tolerate a pebble in our own shoe for a day to definitively save a life. And I suspect none of us would make our kids have one for the rest of their lives to save a single person who had other recourse. 7/X

Masking, especially in young children, is not without costs (and of course, we don’t really know what the costs are because this is unprecedented). Just like having a pebble in your shoe can have a cost. Do it for a day, it’s annoying. For months, you compensate & get hurt 8/X

Right now, we are making our youngest children walk around with pebbles in their shoes every day. For some, it’s a mild annoyance. For others, the blisters are unbearable. We’re doing it “to be safe,” but this safety comes at a cost that our kids are paying. 9/X

There are commonsense improvements we can safely make. The big ones are taken care of—ventilation and vaccination. Certainly we can allow masks off outdoors. We can allow kids to eat lunch with dignity. And FFS, we can let kids drink some water. 10/X

(Sidenote: whatever your stance on this, if you’re an adult who yells at kids when their mask slips, you need to find yourself another profession ASAP. Bye, Felicia.
Back to regularly scheduled thread). 11/X

To me, the lesson of #masklikeakid is not how miserable wearing a mask for a day is (although pls note important caveats in tweet 2). It’s that there is a gradual impact of this over time has a negative impact that our current policies ignore. 12/X

Last thought in this too-long thread: my school building has a metal detector. It was put there sometime in the mid 2000s when the building was deemed very dangerous. Nobody remembers exactly why. And of course, everyone who was in the building then is long graduated. 13/X

But the metal detector is still there, and nearly a thousand kids get searched every day when they just want to come to school. Why? Because 15 years ago, this was done “to be safe,” & nobody thought about an off ramp. It's like we're haunted by the ghosts of 15 years ago. 14/X

Going through scanning is not the worst thing in the world. It creates a lot more inconvenience than you’d think (ask me about fire drills, or what happens when it rains). Does it grind on a child’s soul to be treated like a criminal for coming to school? I have to think so. 15/X

I doubt when they installed the scanner 15 years ago they expected we’d still be using it and yet... We need off ramps. We need to start returning to normal. We need to pull back the most severe restrictions on kids. If we don’t do it now, there’s a chance we never will. END