Ten Things About COVID-19: Number Six

6.) School’s Out...Forever?

We’re half a year into a pandemic that arguably half the global population does not want to acknowledge.  Humans world-wide refuse to change their behavior in order to protect themselves from a positively identified danger.  They go so far as to create elaborate tales explaining why the scientific community has “invented” this pandemic so some not quite identified dastardly entity can take over the world.  Of course, the simple explanation is, “There is a nasty illness spreading across the globe. It could kill you. It more likely will kill your mother and dad or your friend undergoing cancer treatment. You must do these things to protect yourself/them from it.”

WHY IS THAT SO HARD?????

As we approach school season in the US, pandemic-deniers are clamoring to send the children back to school. Get them out from underfoot so their parents can go back to the crappy service jobs that replaced their REAL jobs after the 2008 crash, and our shitty “consumer economy” can get rolling in full force again.   And Trump and his amazingly far-reaching cabal can claim victory and solidify their stranglehold on the US for four more years.

I understand that in 21^st-century America, sending one’s kids off to state-funded daycare, umm…I mean school, was part of the package deal of procreation.  You only have to care for them 24/7 for the first 5 or 6 years of their lives, then you ship them off to school.  Get them out from under your feet for 8 hours a day and let someone else take the burden for awhile.  It’s a pretty attractive deal, really; and in the 2020 US economy, also an economic necessity.  Likely, both Mom and Dad need to have an income in order to maintain the somewhere-between-rich-and-poor lifestyle that has been rapidly eroding over the past 50 years.  Especially now that living-wage blue-collar jobs are a thing of the distant past.

So when people in the top levels of leadership start spouting bullshit like, “Kids don’t catch COVID-19” or “The science says that children can’t be carriers of the virus,” frazzled, worn-down, desperate parents are going to cling to that crap like shipwrecked sailors clinging to bits of floating debris.  If they thought about this at all, they would recall that children are and always have been little germ farms, and schools are and always have been giant petrie dishes where kids get, share, and bring home every bacterium, bug and virus known to mankind.  So why would THIS virus, which has been proven extremely transmittable, especially in indoor environments where humans are packed together for several hours at a time, NOT act the same as every other illness children get and bring home from school?

It doesn’t make sense, does it?  But right now, people are SO done with staying home and adhering (or not) to pandemic protocol, they are more than willing to let someone tell them what they want to hear, rather than use their own powers of reason…which might tell them that the folks saying school will be “safe” are full of shit.  

I don’t have kids.  I don’t have grandkids, or nephews or nieces of school age, so on a certain level, I don’t have a dog in this particular fight.  And I can muster up a modicum of sympathy for the parents whose lives have been upended and are desperate to get their lives back to “normal.”  Reality is a bitch, here. 

But the sooner we realize that “normal” is never coming back, the sooner we’ll get a leg up on this thing and be able to move forward again.  We have to embrace a new normal that is going to involve systems and procedures that are very different from what we’ve become accustomed to.  We are humans.  We are (theoretically) adaptable.  If we can’t/won’t adapt, we will end up where every species that has reached the limits of its adaptability has gone since the beginning of life on the planet: Extinct.  Dead as the dinosaurs. 

Is that what we want?  Because that is where we seem determined to allow ourselves to be led.