I’m not that mad at those recalcitrant kids. Their prefrontal lobes are still developing, and some will grow up to become fully functioning adults, providing they move away from their parental enablers in time.

The parents who encourage their misguided civil disobedience are more problematic. It’s too late to neuter them, and impractical to quarantine them. Even if they were confined to their own houses, many of them would persist in their delusion that they are fighting a noble and quintessentially American fight to preserve their children’s individual liberty in the face of authoritarian oppression.

But it’s selfishness they’re celebrating, not self-actualization. Defying the overwhelming scientific consensus that masking is an effective means of slowing COVID-19 transmission, these parents have simply decided to subordinate the safety of teachers and other people’s children to the personal convenience of their own.

And there’s nothing principled, or even particularly American, about that.