If you put a mask on your kid to fight monkeypox then you have big problems

Sometimes there's a case to be made for public shaming

I think one of the great failures of public life in the Age of COVID is that we utterly abandoned the very useful tool of tactical shaming in order to stop people from abusing kids during this crisis. A great many people have been forcing children to wear damp strips of cotton across their mouths every time they go in public for the last two and a half years, they’ve kept kids sequestered and isolated from their friends and family for months and months on end, and they’ve beaten into children this psychologically hideous idea that if they’re exposed to SARS-CoV-2 then they’re going to get sick and die and also kill their own grandmothers…and we’ve just let people do this without any meaningful blowblack. Hell, it’s de rigueur to treat your child like this these days.

Why are we not making people feel more ashamed and shameful over this disgraceful behavior? I do not know. I admit I myself have failed on this front. Whenever I see a parent out and about making their two-year-old kid wear a useless strip of fabric over his face because of a virus he has statistically a 100% chance of surviving, I have a pretty strong urge to go up to the parent and say, "Wow, that looks just so awful and uncomfortable for your kid. Why are you forcing him to wear that mask? That’s terrible. I’d be so embarrassed to do that to my kid.” But I don’t; none of us does. And the end result of that failure is a generation of many, many intellectually and emotionally wrecked children who will almost certainly have severe paranoia and hypochondria about viruses and health and normal life in some way or another for many years.

Well, maybe we’ll get it right one day. One fails forward towards success, as C.S. Lewis observed. And unfortunately it looks like we’re being given the opportunity right now. In the New York Times last week, a pair of intrepid reporters acknowledged that monkeypox is limited almost entirely to spreading via sex between gay men, that it doesn’t spread easily outside of that, and that for all intents and purposes it does not transmit within “shared spaces like offices or schools.” And yet:

Parents who are concerned about the virus may also be relieved to know that many pandemic precautions and behaviors can be repurposed to protect children against monkeypox: wearing masks in crowded indoor areas, avoiding sharing personal use items, increasing the frequency of hand washing and isolating at home when you’re sick.

I want you to pause for a moment and consider just how fundamentally broken so many things have to be for us to have arrived at this point, where a pair of health and science reporters at one of the most important newspapers in the world are recommending that you strap a cotton strip across your child’s little face in order to protect against a virus that is transmitted almost entirely via gay male sex. Think of all the critical thought processes, the mental red flags, the individual sensible thoughts, the scientific methodology—think of how much of it had to be completely discarded, stuffed down and forgotten like a suburban father using a shovel to beat one last trash bag into the supercan.

You might argue that this is unlikely to happen—that people won’t freak out about monkeypox to the point that they’ll make their kids wear masks in school in order to prevent it. Folks, this is in the New York Times. You can’t compellingly argue that something like this is outside of effective mainstream American thought if it appears in the Times. Maybe you’ll mask your kid to fight monkeypox and maybe you won’t; maybe the parents at your school will and maybe they won’t. But the Times feels confident that’s it’s not an insane proposal to the point that they’re willing to go to print with it—even after they effectively acknowledge that it’s not necessary.

At what people are we willing to discard our inhibitions and just utterly shame the parents who do this? If parents started, say, binding their kids’ hands together with telephone cord to mitigate the risk of touching surfaces, we’d presumably have no problem laying into them over that. Or maybe we wouldn’t say anything. It seems at this late hour that there is no depredation parents will not inflict on their kids in the name of viral safety and that the rest of us will meekly accept if not outright encourage.

This is the world that COVID has wrought. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. But we have to ask ourselves to what depths we are truly comfortable going on this track. I would have thought we couldn’t sink all that much lower after imprisoning kids in their homes, wrecking a considerable portion of their childhoods, teaching them to fear other kids and normal life, forcing them to wear damp, dirty pieces of cotton on their faces for hours on end, and injecting them with experimental pharmaceuticals—all in service to a virus that is, by any reasonable metric, absolutely no threat to them. Yet here we are: Monkeypox is mostly spread by gay orgies and/or anonymous gay sex, and the paper of record is suggesting that you wrap an old shirt around your kid’s face when he goes to school in order to protect against it. “The trouble with hysteria,” Romain Gary wrote, “is that it’s contagious.” It is most assuredly more so than monkeypox.