We are broken.
Those were the three words Kelli Dunaway spoke before her voice cracked in a wave of emotion. Dunaway is a ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Council member who has been unsuccessfully pushing an ordinance to require a mask mandate in the county to protect against the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus.
“ICU beds are dwindling. People are dying,†she said Tuesday night during the council meeting. “Now it’s time to listen to the parents of young children not yet eligible for the vaccine. You see, we are no longer at a breaking point. We are broken. We have had to choose to send our kids back (to school) at any cost.â€
As her voice broke, there was a murmuring in the crowd of mask and vaccine opponents present in the County Council chamber. Chairperson Rita Heard Days gaveled the crowd so Dunaway could finish.
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She withdrew her bill asking the council to pass the mandate it had already voted against on a couple of occasions. But it was a hopeful moment. That’s because Dunaway, Days and council members Lisa Clancy and Shalonda Webb had agreed to put off the issue for a couple of days, until Thursday, when instead of listening to angry folks spreading misinformation, the council will convene to hear from health experts.
Speaking after Dunaway, Webb asked the crowd, which had been mostly on her side as she helped block a mask mandate, to give the council space to operate.
“Allow us to do our jobs, to work, to collaborate, to compromise, to work together,†Webb said.
It was a positive sign, a thaw in the freeze that has existed among the four Democratic women on the council. Clancy and Dunaway generally find themselves on the side of County Executive Sam Page; Webb and Days generally align themselves with the Republicans on the council and in opposition to the mandate sought by Page.
The freeze started for simple enough political reasons: Clancy and Days clashed over the chairmanship of the council, with Days ultimately winning the seat, first in a vote when she and Webb aligned with Republicans, then in court, after a brief legal battle. Since then, Days and Webb have waged political war with Page, including over COVID-19 restrictions, even though the people in their north ºüÀêÊÓƵ County council districts are suffering the most, with lower vaccination rates and higher hospitalization, particularly among African Americans.
In recent days, the four women on the council, all mothers, have been talking about forging a compromise that would allow a comprehensive pandemic plan to pass, one that might increase vaccination rates and allow for the mask mandate sought by health experts as well.
It was a step in the right direction on a day when Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt was walking the wrong way. He filed a lawsuit in Boone County, purportedly against every school district in the state that has instituted a mask mandate, including all of them in ºüÀêÊÓƵ County. Schmitt is seeking to force on the rest of us his version of the freedom to die.
On this day, though, Schmitt, a Republican who is pretending to be a Trump sycophant in the hope of winning the GOP primary for the U.S. Senate, was an outlier. That same day, there were signs of pandemic sanity across the country. Louisiana State University, for instance, announced that all of its students would have to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The powerhouse in the Southeastern Conference also said that anybody attending football games to watch the Tigers play would have to . Later that day, Big Ten football powerhouse Ohio State University announced a similar move.
That night, as the County Council was inching closer to a possible countywide mask mandate, the ºüÀêÊÓƵ School Board passed a measure requiring each of its employees to be vaccinated. The dominoes, in the region and nationally, are starting to fall in the right direction.
Forget the noise made by those spreading misinformation. Most Americans want to do whatever they can to start working together to end the pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 people across the country. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll, for instance, found that to strip school boards that pass mask mandates of funding. A slightly smaller percentage oppose state laws that try to stop local jurisdictions from following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice on masks and vaccines.
As I write this, I don’t know if the County Council will ultimately pass a mask mandate that can survive a court challenge. Or if the University of Missouri, for instance, might follow LSU’s lead so our Tigers’ fans are as well protected as the ones in Louisiana. But there is progress in the battle against the pandemic, and it can start in the simplest of ways: just a couple of moms talking about protecting their children and finding common ground.
Dunaway was right. We are broken, like a teddy bear that has lost the button that was its eye. But a mother’s love can put us back together.