Last Friday afternoon, in our sister state of North Idaho, 200-odd protestors forced the cancellation of a Coeur d’Alene School District board meeting. The protestors stormed the district offices. Staff locked the building down and called police. District trustees left the building by a back door. Police escorted staff to the parking lot by 3 p.m., ending the district workweek a couple of hours early.
Most school districts, these days, have mental-health professionals on speed-dial. It’s likely that the staff and trustees will be offered PTSD evaluation, and, if necessary, counseling. That may sound like mental health overkill (more on mental health later), but it’s not. A mob obeys the dictates of its own inarticulate rage. Facing that rage as it pounds against your locked office door can provide the material for months or years of nightmares for you and the people who love you.
There’s a special place in hell for anyone who bullies low-level public employees, and the protestors who stormed those offices just made their Spa Satan reservations, First Amendment be damned (more on damnation and the First Amendment later).
In a photo of the event, one of the male protestors carries a sign that reads, “My Child, My Choice! No Mask!” These words echo the “My Body, My Choice” placards of women protesting abortion restrictions and anti-vaxxers protesting mandated vaccines, but they have a much different meaning: they assert ownership of one human being over another.
In Idaho, people own their kids. It’s not as bad as in Roman times, when citizens could kill their children without penalty, but it’s bad enough to get two hundred people demonstrating against a health measure that saves lives. For years, various sects in the state have taken advantage of religious freedom laws to forbid their children vaccinations, transfusions, or appendectomies, and have gotten away with murder when some of those children died preventable deaths. It’s hard not to see anti-mask protesters as murderers also, and some of their murders will be of children whose parents trusted school districts to do everything they could to keep their children safe.
We don’t generally voice the idea that families have the same brutal unconscious that mobs do, but anyone who has studied families knows that every one of them creates winners and losers. Often the struggle between siblings is a struggle to determine who will die and who will live, with the parents keeping score and cheering for one kid or another.
Looking at your own family for insights usually doesn’t work. It’s too painful and most families have methods for keeping members confused about what’s violence and what isn’t. But in families not your own it’s much easier to see how lives get stunted, if not destroyed, by unspoken rules and roles.
Rules and roles are in play when parents get up in arms about their children’s classes in sex ed or the racial history of America. If your kids come home from school with opinions contradictory to yours, with different narratives from yours, with masks that turn them into someone you’re not used to, you’ve lost power over them.
Furthermore, your own role in the family story will change. You will go from star to bit player. This reduction-in-rank happens to everyone, even matriarchs and patriarchs who regularly threaten to update their wills or who keep their adult children on figurative chains in figurative basements.
For parents of school-age children, the idea of losing power is deeply threatening. Schools are a convenient scapegoat for whoever it was who took your delightful nine-year-old and turned her into an angry, ugly-dressing, resting-unhappy-face fifteen-year-old stranger who refuses direct orders, or who obeys but deliberately screws things up.
One of the claims against masks is that they work to destroy identity. In adolescence, when identity is in flux, a mask obscures the face, the locus of identity.
But turning a good portion of our young people into anonymous and interchangeable units is—whether you like the idea or not—one of the violent subtexts of universal public education. Some people see masks as part of that violence.
A kind and perceptive teacher will pluck the occasional student off the assembly line and start devoting time and effort to that student’s personal development. Often these teachers are rescuers, people who encourage students to start their own personal narratives in the face of family or cultural expectations.
Perhaps you remember having such a teacher in your own life. Whether your parents were deeply suspicious of that teacher or welcomed her presence in your life says more about how your family reacts to loss of control than it says about that teacher. A lot of families cannot tolerate rewrites of their kids’ stories.
Masks cover the face that for many parents tells the story of a kid’s life, especially at a time when kids have yet to learn how to use their faces as masks.
When I taught in schools that had parent conferences, I was constantly confronted with parents who would refer to their kid in the third person, even when the kid was right beside them. I would say things like, “Paul, your mother says you’re going to be an Olympic skier, which is why you don’t hand in your homework. What do you think of that excuse?”
Or, “Chris, your father wonders what happened to the three-thousand dollar stereo you got for your birthday. He’s afraid to ask you, so I’m asking for him. What’d you do with it?”
(Some answers: Paul wanted to quit the ski team. The team’s after-school drills made him too exhausted to study. He quit and his grades improved, but he died in his twenties after skiing at high speed into a tree. Chris had traded his stereo for a fat ounce of cocaine, becoming, for a two-week period, the most popular boy in the eighth grade. On the strength of his confession, he was sent to boarding school, where, under strict supervision, he became a passable student, if a stolid and unpopular one, and later joined the family defense-contracting firm.
I don’t know whose fate was worse, Paul’s or Chris’s. The Law of Unintended Consequences attends to almost every decision a parent makes, for better or for worse. With adolescents, it’s usually for worse, which is only one of the reasons I never had any desire to become a parent.)
If I saw a student as a human being with an unlimited number of life stories to choose from, I invariably came into conflict with the family system. If I dared express this idea to a parent, I came into conflict with the parent’s sunk costs of time and labor that the student represented.
If you’ve invested your life in raising kids, often to the exclusion of your dreams, you’ll think the kids belong to you, even to the extent of forcing your dreams upon them.
So, to mental health, which comes to mind when I hear vaccines are lethal, that masks cause brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, that Covid is just the flu, or that a species of barely-sentient brain flukes has colonized the skulls of state governors in the Mountain West. These are all narratives that could be believed by the people marching with their anti-mask signs in Coeur d’Alene. They’re in the grip of a story involving family and invasive disease and personal boundaries, and it’s made them crazy—at least in the sense of having a belief system divorced from carefully observed data. Of course, by this definition, almost all of us are crazy.
Some of us are less crazy than others, but it’s hard to separate sane stories from crazy ones. “People say,” starts one particularly useless distinction, useless because large groups of people can all believe an insane story. Social media is another dubious way of finding the truth. The PBS NewsHour is yet another, with its own genteel, polite, and civilized delusions that things aren’t as bad as they seem in the videos.
Rush Limbaugh, before he died and started abusing the bellhops in his suite at Spa Satan, promoted a story that has resurrected civil war in this country. He also insisted he was the smartest guy in the room, a notion almost equally crazy. (In Limbaugh’s circles, Joseph Goebbels was the smartest guy in the room.)
Valid methods do exist when it comes to determining whether a story is psychotic. One of them is the scientific method, which does allow you to determine what’s real and what isn’t, but over an impractically long period of time and in a tiny arena. There’s intuition, which can fail you when you most need it, but which is generally reliable when confined to its role as bullshit detector.
The best method I know of is the highly practical Occam’s Razor, which states the simplest explanation for any phenomenon is usually the best. You can see how it comes into play when you consider that if 9/11 was an inside job, the amount of people who were in on the conspiracy would have, over the years, exceeded the number murdered when the towers went down. People are crappy at keeping secrets, particularly if they’ve murdered someone, and in the case of 9/11, the inside job story gets less and less believable with age.
One definition of mental health, then, is that it’s a condition where the stories you believe in really did happen, and that you don’t assume anything is true when it doesn’t come with solid, careful evidence from several sources. One definition of insanity is basing the whole of your existence on a lie.
How to avoid the latter? You apply Occam’s Razor, the scientific method if you have the time, a certain amount of skepticism based on your experience in the world, and, if you’ve got some, your knowledge of human nature.
You need to tell yourself, again and again, that nothing is for sure. Most people are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty, but it is the watchword of our world these days, and it looks like it will be for some time. We’d better get used to it. The price of certainty is psychosis.
The First Amendment tells a story that Americans have the right to assemble in groups, the right to say what they want, print what they want, believe what they want, worship any entity they want (including Satan), and petition their government for redress. Nowhere does it say that these rights are denied to crazy people, even if those people have assembled to protest school board mask mandates.
If you’re in a group of two hundred angry people, chances are you’re crazy, and are going to be crazy for a long time.
Crazy scales up. Whole countries have gone crazy, as in Mao’s China or Hitler’s Germany. Trump’s Republican Party has doubled and tripled down on a massive psychosis, even as each claim of election fraud is proven to be false. Tribes go crazy and families go crazy, almost always according to scripts written by people who don’t have to watch the destruction because they died long ago.
The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci promoted the idea that the only people who understood a group psychosis were the people who had been pushed to the margins of the group. Being dispossessed and scorned let them comprehend the arena they’d been kicked out of way better than the people who had kicked them out.
Gramsci tells us that sanity requires the courage to consciously embrace the real in the face of groupthink. Resource depletion, an overheated planet, and a continuing pandemic make all of us, not just parents, yearn for the distraction of evil school board trustees. But in that direction lies madness.
Sanity is lonely. Consciousness is lonely. It’s tempting to lose yourself in the unconsciousness of others. But it’s far less damning, as this fall eases into the coming winter, to look for honest companionship, the gentle heat of a warm woodstove, and good, thoughtful conversation. You won’t find them in the mob.