I live in a purple area (the suburbs, outside Chicago), so it's a good barometer of the mood of the country at large.  And from what I can tell, people are waking up to the authoritative nature of today's Democrat party.

It's so easy to stick one's head in the sand about what's going on in this country when it doesn't affect your everyday life.  Many of my friends don't read the news at all.  Ever.  But these COVID mandates are hard to ignore, especially when they're aimed at our kids.  Now, at summer parties, all people seem to talk about is if their children will be forced to wear masks again at school or if the schools will continue to make our kids quarantine for ten days if they get exposed.  Parents have speculated about if their kids will be forced to get the jab to be in extracurricular activities or even to go to school at all.  If our government can force our military to get the jab, why not students in public schools?

Although parents in school districts in my area have voted by a strong majority to have masks be optional, parents' opinions are being ignored.  Illinois's Gov. J.B. Pritzker (locally known as King Jelly Belly) announced that all students, regardless of vaccination status, will be required to wear masks this fall as well as all other COVID mandates from last school year.

We are just across the border in Indiana, and I can tell you my children heard the news with dread.  Our county follows everything Chicago/Illinois does, so it's likely our school district will fall in line with the Democratic machine.  My kids, and almost every child I know, hated the masks last year.  They complained that they couldn't breathe, that the masks gave them headaches and caused them to have to yell to be heard by friends and teachers. 

Last fall, when there were no vaccines and few studies, most parents were understanding of the masks.  Although we already knew that the risk to kids was virtually zero, no one wanted teachers getting COVID-19 from their students.  I told my kids, "It's only temporary," about every other day last year when they would complain.  I should have known better.

This year, after several studies informed us that children are not spreaders of the disease, and every adult in the country has had the opportunity to get the vaccine, things should go back to normal.  Right?  Yet the Democrat party and their media just won't stop trying to inject us with our daily dose of fear.

Although the president has falsely claimed that the delta variant is more contagious and deadly, the evidence says otherwise.  In an article at TheBlaze, Daniel Horowitz examined data from England and found that "the Delta variant has a 0.1% case fatality rate (CFR) out of 31,132 Delta sequence infections confirmed by investigators. That is the same rate as the flu and is much lower than the CFR for the ancestral strain or any of the other variants."

So we have herd immunity from the original COVID variant; the delta variant is not any deadlier than the flu; and we still have masks, social distancing, contact tracing, and the nonstop sanitizing.  Why?  Like many parents, I feel as though I'm locked in a game of Simon Says where the goal is to train us into obedience.  At what point do we pull our kids out and homeschool?  Will homeschooling even be an option in the future?  It's not in many European countries already.  People who don't follow the news might have voted against "the mean tweeter" in this election, but these draconian mandates enforced on their children will have them voting red come 2022.  

Danielle Johnson is a new author of Surviving Utopia, a series that follows the collapse of the Soviet Union through the eyes of four dissident teenagers.

Image via Pexels.

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