Last week, a disturbing video went viral. It was from a school board meeting in Rutherford County, Tennessee, and it showed a young student being mocked and heckled by anti-mask adults for sharing a story about how his grandmother died of COVID. It was yet another dispiriting reminder of the uphill battle the nation faces to reach the other side of the pandemic. But at least this one has a happy ending: The mask mandate the student was advocating for got approved after all.
Last Tuesday, the student, Grady Knox, took the podium at a school board meeting that was filled with the kinds of anti-mask protesters that have been filling such gatherings nationwide. Undeterred, he spoke about the loss his family had faced because of people who hadn’t taken a once-in-a-century public health crisis seriously.
“This time last year, my grandmother, who was a former teacher at the Rutherford County school system died of Covid because someone wasn’t wearing a mask,” Knox said. As he spoke, adults began giving him a hard time.
“If they laugh at me about, like, a personal story about my grandmother, that’s just disrespectful,” Knox later told reporters. “I was like shaken a little bit.”
Board member Claire Maxwell later said she was “ashamed” at the antics of the anti-mask adults, including a woman seen in the video, holding a sign that reads “Let our kids smile,” who cracks a smile at Knox’s tragic story. But the joke was on them: According to WKRN out of Nashville, The mandate wound up passing after all. In other words, don’t give up the fight against those making the pandemic worse than it is already.
(Via The Daily Beast)