Dear Allan,
Thank you so much for your help and info. I have read your book and it has helped me to not have to wear a mask in many situations and given me much needed confidence.
I have two children that I kept out of school this year and would like to send them back to school in the fall. I’m pretty upset with the school because initially this year they said that the kids only had to wear masks when they were dropped off in the morning and when being picked up. I recently received a school newsletter and noticed in the pictures that they had kids with masks on in the gym. Not even on their mouth but on their chins which in itself is ridiculousness.
This is a private Christian school. I am waiting to see how things progress with the masks through the next couple months. Do you have any tips to help me with this? I was thinking I can try religious exemptions and also our state mandate in NC that if a child does not want to wear a mask they don’t have to and are exempt. I can use that line to try and fight it. Is there any thing else that you can think of that will help me to try and get them exempt from the school’s policy?
Kind regards,
A Concerned Parent
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The best way to accomplish this is having a good friendly relationship with the principal and any other members of the decision making body. Someone in that school makes decisions and allows room for exemptions and that’s a great person or people to spend a few hours a month getting to know better.
Invite them over for your award winning chili or your wife’s famous chicken paprikash. Let them get to know you as humans. Don’t do this just because you want something from them, but do this because this is the right way to treat people who play a pronounced role in your life and the lives of your family members.
A Gift Of 2020 — An Urgent Return To Basic Principles Of Human Decency
A gift of 2020 has been to highlight how important human decency is in our own lives and in the world around us. Face masks aren’t a problem because of laws. Face masks are really a problem because of human decency. One-size-fits-all medical approaches have no place in the life of an individual human and certainly not foisted upon us by force or threat of force.
If we, as a society, can step away from this over-reliance on government, that would be helpful for us to put things into perspective. Around the time of the American Revolution, numerous documents point to the only justification for a government being the preservation of freedom. Freedom is another term for human decency. Those who recognize this are more able to lead us away from a perverted use of government and toward the fundamental reasons that any laws exists: to promote that human freedom, that human decency.
Freedom is natural to us. It is part of our humanness. The law only is legitimate in so far as it recognizes and operates for the purpose of upholding that. No further. The law exists for man and not man for the law.
If we cannot return to those basic principles, the greatest pain will be visited upon us as we try to make sense of where we are going and why we are going there. The blind must not be allowed to lead the blind. Those with vision must stand up and lead.
Beware Of Some Of Your Masculine Tendencies At A Moment Like This
The less-than-admirable, hired gun, political consultant Frank Luntz pointed out in his book Words that Work: men like war imagery in their political speeches. Women do not.
You have suggested it is time to “fight” this. This reveals you as a man, in my mind, or at least a woman with masculine tendencies. There are things that need to be fought. There are threats that need to be clubbed with your cave man bludgeon or neutralized with your sabertooth dagger.
I, like you, am ready to jump to protect my family and my tribe any time danger rears its head.
This is how many political battles are waged. We call them “campaigns” for a reason. They are named for the military campaigns of the past, so named for open flat spaces in the Italian countryside and other places, related to the French word campagne, or Latin campania and campus, meaning field or open space. A region in Italy still bears a similar name. I understand this way of thinking very well. I have a warrior spirit in me and a great deal of courage, which I think also describes you and many readers of these pages.
We are ready for the military battle, we are ready for the political battle, we are ready for the cultural battle, we are ready for the spiritual battle, bring on the next campaign.
We must not let this powerful tool of ours be so relied on by us, though, that it becomes an impediment rather than an implement. Sometimes a bare knuckle fight is not the right approach.
Your specific request of how to handle fave mask mandates or other one-size-fits-all health approaches in a private school is one such moment.
I have one set of advice for a parent in a public school, which starts with “get started gently, then be ready to go to battle” and I have a different set for those with children attending private school “start out gently, use lots of finesse, keep everyone happy, and never go to battle.”
Why The Truly Feminine Is So Incredibly Important Right Now
If you are like almost anyone in America over the last two or three generations, you have neglected the role of family and community in your life, and you have emphasized the roles of systems and outcomes in your life. By 2020, we’ve seen some serious flaws by thinking we can welcome computers to run the show in life, or even that we can welcome people to run the show whose only redeeming quality in life appears to be that they can talk to computers better than most other people can.
Talking to computers pays well, but you are a fraction of a person if that is your redeeming quality. So much more is needed to be a complete man or a complete woman, and quite naturally, even more than that is needed if one is to lead.
Women tend to have a natural ability to bond people. There are plenty of counter examples to that, and there is no lack of bonding that is initiated by men, but the formation of a hearth, a particularly feminine ability, and the formation of a community around a hearth is an important feminine quality that is so overlooked.
Predictably, by letting this vital quality of community-building get dismissed as “oppression” and “mere homemaking,” with hardly any resistance to such nonsensical claims by most men, a great schism in society has been caused, for the important role of the feminine has been to create bonds that last through the greatest turmoil and which no bureaucrat can possibly undo.
This tendency is pointed to in so many ways. It is pointed to in Beowulf, through the language used to describe women. It is pointed out by speech communication researchers who note that the average woman speaks about three times as many words as the average man each day. Though it may no longer be a notable topic for her in the current political milieu, researcher Deborah Tannen once described men as communicating for the purpose of data transmission and women as communicating for the purpose of bonding.
This dichotomy describes one detail that often leaves retired men suddenly very lonely, for their former data source (their job) has left their lives. They suddenly have nothing noteworthy to talk to anyone about and they, at some level, intimately realize that. Women handle this transition notably better, for it was never about the data for them, it was always about the relationship when they spoke words.
Men may point to the fact that women seem to speak forever and say nothing. Well, that’s true in some ways, especially from a masculine perspective. Many women may not necessarily be communicating hard facts at the heart of what they are saying, but they may be communicating something even more valuable for the survival of a family and also of a tribe: “I care about you and that is why we are speaking” or “I am interested in you and I want to spend this time engaging” or “I love you and I want to feel more closely bonded to you through our exchange of words.”
The masculine protects the tribe using blunt communication to provide information succinctly. The feminine protects the tribe by using communication to bond. These are not hard and fast boundaries, but useful and telling generalities.
With Mother’s Day this weekend, it’s notable how disgraceful the treatment of mothers has been in popular culture for the last sixty years of American history. The feminist movement, and much of the thrust of modernity, was a dismissal of this vital role and its replacement with a lie: “Dear woman, just act more like a men and you will be happier, the men in your life will be happier, your children will be happier, it will be better for society, and also you’ll simply feel more adequate.”
2020 could not have happened without that SICK, TAWDRY, INSULTING lie being believed by so many, and especially by mothers. I denounce you if any part of you buys into such nonsense. Man and woman we were made. There are two different ones. The differentness is special.
The Word Feminism Is A Lie
The word feminism is a lie. It has nothing to do with the feminine. It is an insult of that which is feminine. If you honor humanity, no part of you should have anything to do with those toxic ideas. Uplift the mother for the queen she is. Uplift the wife for the queen she is. Uplift the feminine in her for the jewel to society that it is.
This “be more like a man and you will be more adequate of a woman” style of thinking is sickness.
So, dear man, as I write this to you, I want you to honor the warrior in you and also to recognize that your wife might need to take the lead on this mission, and to do that she needs to do away with her “be more like a man” style of brainwashing. She needs to lean into her feminine. She needs to lean into that part of her that builds families, that builds nations, that shapes worlds.
That doesn’t happen around the conference table. It happens around the kitchen table.
It’s not time to fight. It’s time to relate.
The Dopiness Of This Era & It’s Connection To Money
The dopiness of living life under the world reserve currency at the behest of the central bank under Keynesian and monetarist theories of money and credit have left so much of society utterly clueless on how irrelevant finance really is in life.
For what will be a blink of the eye in history, we have perverted our way of thinking to allow us to see the conference table as so important, to allow us to see the boardroom as important, to allow us to see financiers and bankers and M&A attorneys and MBAs as vital. It’s so goofy.
The hearth has been the building block of all human cooperation for time immemorial. This era is so goofy that the hearth has literally been replaced by the conference table.
This thinking is a contagion all around us.
There’s a plethora of industries created by the attempt to direct the money sloshing around the economy trying to eke out any return. It’s an exciting game, but still a game as opposed to reality. The game is built upon and enabled by our deceitful and artificial monetary policy that cannot and will not last forever. How much we have squandered playing such stupid games, even going so far as giving our brightest minds to these games.
Homes are destroyed so mom and dad can go out and play this game. Kids are raised to go play this game. Eventually it ends. When it ends, what is left under the surface? What is left but facade? What is left that will get you through the transition? What is left that is not either Decadence or its twin sister Decay?
It starts around the proverbial hearth. There aren’t many hearths in Silicon Valley. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there. There’s a lot of bling. A lot of flash. A lot of people who know how to speak to a computer, but never figured out how to look a person in the eye or give a good handshake or to even the see the humanity in another.
Get To Know People Better
Government teaches us to use a bludgeon for everything we need. It’s what government does. The bigger government grows, the more common it is for people to turn to the bludgeon of government, and ultimately to justify the bludgeon of government.
That’s a problem, because it creates a vicious circle, by which more people buying into this paradigm create more demand for government, thereby increasing the need to expand the size of government.
As described above, rather than pushing and threatening, you are generally benefitted by taking that option off the table. Surely you can use government to push around a private school, and that’s something you might save as a last resort, but if you psychologically remove even that as an option, you are significantly benefited in your dealings. I would consider that a most worthy attitude if you could take that off the table.
Almost everything you need to accomplish in life can be done with this: get to know people better. That’s it. Nothing else really needs to happen. All the rest of this writing is irrelevant if you can just do that.
Almost all of my writing on face masks is a crutch to help people communicate more honestly and to ultimately just get to know people around them better.
While women are busy trying to be more masculine, and men are busy trying to tone down their masculine — all in the name of the fraudulently termed “feminism” — we are left with an absence created by that missing feminine. It is the feminine that makes everything so worthwhile, that makes all the work and sacrifice worth it, yet it has been ripped out from society in so many quarters.
And something the feminine is so good at, is simply getting to know people better.
I Really Hope You’ll Stop Reading This Essay Now
I really hope most people will just stop reading right there and just work on this. The rest of the essay is so second rate compared to what’s been written. Everything I have to say is so second rate compared to this. It’s really all an attempt to get to this. This is the whole point:
Be the man you were made to be. Be the woman you were made to be. Pair with a mighty man. Pair with woman of virtue. Build a hearth. Raise a family. Become the cornerstone of a community. Build institutions in your community that no sneeze can blow over, no pencil neck can shut down, no pale skinned, deluded man sitting around talking to computers can rend asunder, no matter how many billions of dollars of funny money Federal Reserve notes he has.
Don’t you understand how scared they are of you? Don’t you understand how scared they are that you will just act on your human-ness and act on it with the authority placed in you if you will just accept it?
Stop making it so hard on yourself.
Now, I’ll talk about more stupidities that work in the short term, but which really miss the whole point if the above is ignored.
Just getting to know people better can go a long way.
Use Your Wallet — A Useful, Peaceful Technique To Keep In Mind
You already pay an arm and a leg for tuition. Well, you deserve your money’s worth. Approach it from that perspective. Let the decision maker know you pay a pretty penny to go there and the individualized treatment of your children is one reason you and your wife chose private Christian school over the cesspool government indoctrination camp across town.
Right there in the first chapter of Genesis, we have this fundamentally important linchpin of Western Civilization: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
If the principal or other decision maker doesn’t relent, be ready to make a donation to the school. I’m not joking. If you ask me, the kids should be at home getting taught by you. They probably get 80% of the government indoctrination where they are. If the extra time to yourself is worth it to you, please shell out the extra money.
If the health of the student body is so important, these masks are not a real solution for that. Offer to help raise money for a new fitness center to really do the job of keeping students healthy, thereby allowing masks to be optional or done away with. Offer to not only help raise money, but to also write the first check.
Pragmatic principals can be quite receptive to parents willing to help invest in the school, in exchange for a higher level of specialized service for their child. Some surprisingly dimwitted offspring have gotten through school by parents using that technique. Though the ethics of giving money to get a dimwitted kid matriculated is questionable, delivered properly, there should be no hesitation around helping the principal feel empowered to encourage unrestricted breathing.
This Works At EVERY School
Start to surround yourself increasingly with parents from that school by attending events where they are likely to be, by specifically seeking them out, or by hosting events.
Every time you run into a parent, or have occasion to talk to them, ask them what they think of mask mandates on children. Find one who agrees with you. Meet regularly. Find a second who agrees with you. Make sure you all meet regularly. Never let them out of sight without exchanging numbers. A friendly “How do I keep in touch with you?” can be very useful if you are at a loss for what to say in order to ask a compatriot for a phone number.
Even at a small school, across all the grades, you might find 50 parents who agree with you.
You may have been the one annoying dad before who eats up an hour of the principal’s time every time there is a difference of opinion between you and the principal.
Suddenly you become the annoying dad with 50 friends who eat up 10, 20, or 50 hours of time every time the principal and the dad have a difference of opinion.
That only has to happen once before the principal quickly realizes that it’s not worth it to have a difference of opinion with you. It just makes more sense for the principal to make sure you guys see eye-to-eye.
If you go this route keep it really helpful and supportive. Don’t get antagonistic. It’s not a fight. It’s you trying to help them provide an even better atmosphere for your child in the midst of all the pressures the administration has to face.
Please share this article with someone you know in this situation or a similar situation.
Wearing the face mask or letting your children wear a face mask is an immoral and harmful reinforcing of a lie. If you need pointers on how to never wear one again, have a look at Allan Stevo’s best selling “Face Masks in One Lesson,” his LewRockwell.com writing, or his videos and classes by signing up for his email newsletter at RealStevo.com. At a time like this, you are the only thing protecting your kids from the abyss. You can do this, and your kids need you to stand up and do this.
