Brighter side of Common Sense

 

                I’ve talked about schools before, but with a wife who is a teacher, and a son who is about to start Kindergarten and a daughter who is about to start pre-school; its something very important to me, and something that I am forced to think about a lot. I must think about the health and safety of my family, they are the most important thing to me. I might have overlooked the magnitude of going back to school this September, because I never thought that we as Americans would ignore fact and commonsense as much as we currently have. I had always held out hope, that forcing kids back to school was just rhetoric to maybe scare people into doing the right thing. I cannot rationalize kids going back to school anymore. It’s immoral and it’s inhumane.

                The biggest argument for sending kids back is that the economy depends on it. Fine, it stands to reason that the economy will be best suited if the working class has a place to stash their kids during the day while they work. However, if you even start to think about this, schools aren’t a day care. Schools teach the next generation skills that they will need to eventually join the workforce. If you continue to think about it, schools generally go 7-2, 8-3, 9-4…last I checked standard working hours were 9-5. Working parents would still need to account for at least a few hours a day. All of this is not taking into account that schools (at least in this area) have been on summer break for the last several months. What have parents been doing with their kids during these last few months? Have they not been working? Or have they not been trying to find jobs? How have parents been dealing for the last 3 months? My kids have been home, and I think we’ve reached each other’s nerves, but they’ve been home because it’s the summer. Not because there is impending death all around us.

                The next argument is that kids don’t get symptoms at nearly the same rate as adults. While this may be true, there has been no evidence that kids don’t spread the virus at the same rate. Meaning, these kids may be perfectly fine, but they could easily infect grandma without knowing. No one else in the family has any symptoms, but grandma, well, she’s dead.

                We can’t reasonably expect kids to exhibit better hygiene than us adults. The transmission rate amongst adults is insane, the average infected person will infect 3 people. Do we honestly think that our children who are less likely to wear masks than the best educated human are going to do better? Our children are and always have been a petri dish of every virus or bacteria out to get us. This is their nature, but apparently COVID-19 is different, it doesn’t care about kids, it only wants adults. Are we really this stupid? Seriously? Because younger people have less severe symptoms its ok if they get it, what does it matter if it spreads just as easy as snow melts in the summer.

                Moving on to how some schools have responded to having in-person learning this fall. The school district where my son would attend school decided that kids would attend class 2 days a week, fine seems safe, but those 2 days would be half a day. You can’t tell me that sending a kid to school 2 days a week for 4 hours would be easier to a working-class family than if the kid stayed home all day every day. I don’t blame the school’s here, they are trying to do the best they can to keep their students safe. I’m merely trying to point out the fact that forcing kids back to school is as stupid as it sounds.

                At any given time, the best thing for our economy is to educate our children. They will always be there to fill in our shoes, to take over and to innovate. They are the cornerstone to our future. I get the need to educate them, but do we think that sending them to a class with 30 other kids and coming home and infecting mom and dad won’t affect them? Will they still be able to commit, and contribute to the greater good knowing that they contributed to countless deaths?

                Do we not owe it to our children? Do we not owe it to ourselves, to consider that we are in a period where things are out of our control? We need to depend on each other, our neighbors, now more than ever. We need to band together, to recognize that we all inhabit the same Earth. We all need to work together, we need to wear masks, we need to keep our distance. We need to figure out the best way for our kids to learn from home. We need to figure out how to function as Americans. There needs to be more than Republican and Democrat. We live on this continent together, and we affect each other. It’s probably time we admit it, and act on it.

                The greatest ability about humanity is understanding. We know so much about almost all living creatures on this planet. I think it’s about time we apply that to humans, whether they look like us or not. We need to acknowledge our future with our kids, and we need to acknowledge that we don’t all look the same. We have immense differences, that is what make us unique, what make us…us. We need to understand that though we may look different, we are all human, and work together to make the world.