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BARROW NEWS-JOURNAL
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 18, 2021
Opinions
“Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. ”
- Henry Ward Beecher ~
Mob spreads nonsense at public meeting
I've covered a lot of meetings over the
past 40+ years. Some have been a little
rowdy, especially about controversial zon
ing issues. A few have been ugly, like the
one a few years ago at the old Benton El
ementary School in Jackson County when
the public was upset at plans to consolidate
the school into another, nearby facility.
But I don’t remember a meeting with the
degree of both public ignorance and pub
lic rudeness that I saw during the
Aug. 5 meeting of the Jackson
County Board of Education.
That meeting was a microcosm
of what's happening across the
nation as schools reopen for the
new year amid an onslaught of
misinformation about Covid and
the seriousness of the Delta vari
ant. School systems are trying to
keep kids and employees safe,
but are finding it difficult to man
age due to pushback from misin
formed parents who, essentially,
don't want schools to take or encourage
any precautions.
At the core of all that is not health care
or even education; it's simply politics.
Misinformation about Covid has fueled
a rising political populism where rudeness
and ignorance is lowering the level of pub
lic discourse.
The result is information chaos as the
nation sinks further into a muck of pan
demic propaganda.
• ••
It's understandable that many people are
frustrated right now. A few weeks ago, we
thought we were seeing light at the end of
the dark Covid tunnel. It looked like we
would soon get back to “normal.”
But the rise of more contagious Covid
variants such as Delta changed the game.
The number of new Covid cases is rising
quickly here and around the nation. Jack-
son County has the highest Covid rate in
north Georgia right now and Banks Coun
ty has the lowest vaccination rate. Barrow
County is also among the highest infection
rates and lowest vaccination rates in the
area. Hospitals are again starting to fill up
with patients. Younger people are report
edly getting sicker with the new variants
than they did with the first Covid virus.
All of that has led to another round of
discussions about mask and vaccine man
dates in public places, including schools.
Nobody wants any of that. We all just
want the damn virus to go away.
But school systems just can't ignore the
implications of a highly-contagious virus
that has caused so much death and sick
ness over the last 15 months.
If the issue were just about health care,
it would be difficult, but manageable. But
Covid isn't just about health care any
more, it's also about one group of citizens
staging a political theater.
Misinformation and propaganda online
has radicalized a lot of people who have
come to believe that Covid is overblown
and that their “freedoms” are being tak
en away by evil forces lurking about who
want them to wear a mask and get a vac
cine.
The result is that a certain group of par
ents, backed by partisan political leaders
who feed them a diet of misinformation
on social media, are pushing back against
masking and quarantining rules in schools.
They don't want schools to take any action
to protect children. "That’s not your job,”
one parent told the BOE.
• ••
The issues of masking and quarantine
rules are fodder for legitimate conversa
tion in a community.
But what happened Aug. 5 at the BOE
meeting wasn't a conversation, it was a
political mob which wanted to cram its
anti-mask, anti-vaccine, anti-government
agenda down the throats of school system
leaders.
Several people said things that were
false and misleading during that meeting
(and at the board’s Aug. 9 meeting,) but
the worst offender was Natisha Kidwell,
a family nurse practitioner at Northeast
Georgia Medical Center in Gainesville.
Kidwell used her standing as someone in
the medical profession to spout nonsense.
She spoke as someone in medicine, but her
agenda was clearly rooted in her fringe
personal political views.
Among the misinformation Kidwell
blathered was that masks don't help slow
the transmission of Covid. While masks
aren't 100% effective, they do help, ac
cording to the Mayo Clinic and other rep
utable medical sources. According to Bos
ton Children's Hospital, the nation's top
pediatric hospital, "Face masks reduced
the chances of infection by more than 80
percent.”
Kidwell also claimed that the PCR tests
isn't accurate, implying it exaggerates the
number of cases (the test is accurate ac
cording to a NIH study); she compared
Covid to having a cold; and she ques
tioned how lethal Covid really is by ask
ing if people were dying “from” Covid or
“with” Covid. (A clever phrase,
but it’s total BS. Covid is killing
people.)
Kidwell's most astounding
claim, however, was that people
who have been vaccinated and
got a breakthrough case of Covid
were not doing well while being
treated at NGMC. She offered
zero evidence to back up that
claim, a claim that is contrary to
what was said by NGMC leaders
recently.
Speaking at a NGMC news con
ference, Dr. Erine Raybon-Rojas, a critical
care physician at NGMC, said: “Getting
vaccinated will not guarantee you that you
won't get COVID, but the key thing is that
getting vaccinated dramatically protects
you against severe infection, reducing the
chance that you will die from COVID or
be hospitalized from COVID.”
Kidwell doesn't work on the font lines
with Covid patients at NGMC, so her com
ments carry zero credibility. (You can go
to nghs.com/vaccine to get the NGMC's
official position on masking and vaccina
tions.)
So why would she spread medical misin
formation at a public meeting?
Because Kidwell had a personal politi
cal agenda she wanted to spread.
A quick look at her social media post
ings clearly indicates that she's deep into
fringe political views, including a post
she made on Jan. 6 that claimed Antifa,
not radical Trump supporters, stormed the
U.S. Capital. (Antifa had nothing to do
with the events of Jan. 6.)
No, Kidwell wasn't at the BOE meeting
to share her medical experience, she was
there to spread political propaganda.
And the crowd on Aug. 5 cheering her on
was just as bad as her comments — they
were unruly, interrupting and shouting out
other tidbits of misinformation they had
obviously gotten off of social media.
Welcome to the brave new world of lu
natic politics in the public square.
• ••
I feel for school leaders across the na
tion who have to deal with this kind of po
litical-motivated claptrap while trying to
navigate through a pandemic.
Schools have a responsibility to do what
they can to keep their students safe, to
keep their staff members safe and to help
keep the larger community safe. By their
very nature, schools have the potential to
be incubators of widespread disease trans
mission. That’s a heavy responsibility
school officials bear.
Should they mandate masks in schools?
Should they quarantine students who have
had close contact?
There is a balance in all of that; some
students can't wear a mask for medical
reasons. Some students would be harmed
by having to stay home for several days
from close contact if they don't have
Covid symptoms.
But there are other students and school
employees to consider, too. Some students
and teachers can't get the vaccine because
of medical reasons, or their age, and are
vulnerable to getting seriously ill if ex
posed to Covid.
The issue isn't just about the “rights”
of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, it's also
about the rights of others to be as safe as
possible in a school environment and in
the larger community.
• ••
I trust that local school leaders are doing
the best they can under very, very difficult
circumstances. Whether we agree with
every detail of their Covid rules or not,
they deserve to be given the benefit of the
doubt as the new school year begins. No
body expected the Delta variant to upend
everything.
Like everyone else, school officials are
trying to adapt in real time to a rapidly
changing situation in the nation.
They don’t deserve to be hounded by an
unruly mob's intellectually-shallow non
sense.
Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Main-
street Newspapers. He can be reached at
mike @ mainstreetnews. com.
mike
buffington
Letter to the Editor
Thanking high school bands
for their hard work
Dear Editor:
Just a note to compliment and
thank you for the wonderful ar
ticle about the Barrow County
high school bands that were fea
tured in the July 28 issue of the
newspaper.
These dedicated students and
directors prepare, practice and
play year-round to bring joy to
many school events. And parents
dedicate hours of volunteer time
in support of these musical pro
grams and activities.
This teamwork brings pleasure
to all and builds character in our
youth.
Thank you, bands, and thank
you, Barrow News-Journal.
Dianne Sweckard
Winder
The economics of homemaking
The last 10 years of her life,
Mama once said, were the hap
piest of an extremely happy, ful
filling life.
Daddy had “made his way to
the Lord” a decade before Mama
did so.
For the final chapter
of her life, Mama was
able to “loafer” and do
whatever she pleased,
whenever she pleased.
She no longer had to
rise at dawn to make a
pan of buttermilk bis
cuits and cook a full
breakfast of eggs, coun
try ham, grits and gra
vy.
And when the time
came for supper, she
no longer had to cook a meal.
Instead, she either had a bowl
of cereal or fried up a pan of
cornbread and enjoyed that with
a glass of sweet milk or butter
milk.
Make no mistake about it,
though. Mama treasured her
years of staying home to raise
four children and diligently
looking after her husband.
On the day before her sudden
death stunned us all, she talked
about the 87 years that had gone
before.
“God has been so good to me,”
she said.
“All I ever wanted was to be a
wife and a homemaker. As a lit
tle girl, that’s all I wanted — to
grow up, marry a good man and
have children. God has given me
everything I’ve ever wanted.”
Mama was good at being a
homemaker. Our little house was
always dusted and neatly kept.
Her morning routine included
cooking breakfast, making beds,
washing dishes (she never owned
a dishwater though I longed
for one my entire childhood),
sweeping floors and, in summer,
watering her flowers before the
heat attacked in a wave of hu
midity.
Probably because I witnessed
daily the joy of Mama’s home
making, I wanted to be a home
maker.
I think that’s one of the love
liest words in the English lan
guage. To me, the noun “home
maker” is glorious and one of
life’s most important occupa
tions.
Mama taught me housekeeping
— though on any given day you’d
probably dispute that given what
a mess my kitchen is, with mail
strewn from one end to the other
— how to sew, cook and bake.
(Every time I think of her stern
est commandment: Scrape every
drop out of the bowl and waste
nothing.)
To my joy, these lessons of
Mama’s were magnified by the
home economist of our electric
membership corporation, the
Write a Letter to the Editor:
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include the city of the writer.
wise woman who oversaw home
economics for the county ex
tension agency, three incredible
home ec teachers, 4-H and FHA
(Future Homemakers of Ameri
ca) clubs.
All these women beamed with
happiness as they ex
plained gardening, can
ning, how to put in a
concealed zipper, cus
tom sizing a pattern,
and knitting a sweater.
Mrs. Jean Trotter,
Mrs. Gloria Ray, and
Mrs. Lydia Daniels Park
were instrumental in my
learning.
Mrs. Ray sparkled
with delight as she
taught us how to fold a
fitted sheet by tucking the cor
ners together. I think of her every
time I wash linens.
My grandmother taught me to
crochet but Mrs. Trotter taught
me the more complicated art of
knitting, while Mrs. Park, al
ways laughing, introduced me to
cooking foods other than South
ern cuisine.
All three women are still in
vesting in me by supporting my
projects and cheering me on.
Even dearer to my heart is that
they all knew, and loved, Mama.
Once, while in high school, we
had two student teachers from
the University of Georgia. As
the time neared for their return
to Athens, Mama cooked a big
Southern country meal and host
ed all of these dear teachers.
Now, when Mama cooked to
impress, it was, indeed, impres
sive.
Fried chicken, roast beef, huge
platters of vegetables, a pie and
a cake.
One of the young teachers,
whose name was Arilla, wrote
Mama a beautiful thank you note
and used the occasion to teach
our class the importance of writ
ing “bread and butter” notes.
“Whenever anyone hosts you
in their home, you must write a
thank you note.”
This is my bread and butter
note to these wonderful women.
Thank you very much.
Ronda Rich is a best-selling
Southern author. Visit www.
rondarich.com to sign up for her
free weekly newsletter
The Barrow News-Journal
Winder. Barrow County. Ga.
www.BarrowJournal.com
Mike Buffington Co-Publisher
Scott Buffington Co-Publisher
Scott Thompson Editor
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