If a picture is worth a thousand words, the photo of Gavin Newsom and Magic Johnson sans masks is worth an entire lexicon.  As criticism mounts and Newsom struggles to justify his "do as I say, not as I do" philosophy, kids are taking matters into their own hands.

Students in the Oakdale Joint Unified School District used Newsom's disregard of his own mask policies to organize maskless protests.  Three hundred seventy-five students went to school without masks on Wednesday, and 344 refused to mask up on Thursday.  Nolan Harris, an Oakdale High School freshman, said, "If they don't follow by their own rules that they're trying to force upon me, why should I follow them?"

Kids without masks also marched on the Oakdale Joint Unified School District headquarters, listening to cheers from people in the streets who supported their protest.  In San Diego, students referenced Newsom's photo as their rationale for refusing to wear masks in schools.

The kids are definitely on to something.  Research has identified critical learning periods that shape the brains of children.  Conversational interplay is partly related to words, partly to social interaction.

It would seem that children are beginning to react instinctively to what scientists have documented — namely, that cognitive development is linked to language that includes the quality as well as the quantity of words that are heard.  At this point in time, we all know from bitter experience how poor the quality of conversation is when words are muffled and facial expressions are hidden by masks.

Image: Oakdale students protest masks.  YouTube screen grab.

Was it ever possible that masks could work to prevent the spread of COVID?  Randomized control trials, the gold standard for scientific research, suggest that the answer is no.  California has forced children into masks, while Florida has allowed children to run free.  The number of children contracting COVID in both states is approximately the same — again suggesting that masks do not work in any meaningful way to prevent the spread of COVID.

I feared that an entire generation was going to succumb to the notions that normal human interaction is too perilous to take part in, that showing one's face in public is tantamount to announcing one's intention to commit mass murder by microbe, and that the only socially responsible way to live was by cowering in fear behind a scrap of cloth.  Now I am heartened by the protests breaking out across California, spearheaded by children who have decided to take back their childhood.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of Future Slave, a story about a 21st-century black teenager who goes back in time and becomes a slave in the Old South.