If I still had kids in school during the time of this pandemic, I would be asking one question:
“What are you people doing to reduce the chance my kids will get COVID-19?”
At this point, little else matters, and it appalls me how many so-called parents see precautions beiong taken as some sort of political acts they cannot support.
We’re really a fairly horrible country when it comes to our children. For all the “U-S-A, U-S-A!” crap we spew, we’re one of the few modern nations that blames children for having bad parents.
For all his sliminess — and few people in the world are slimier — Newt Gingrich actually tried to address the problem back in the 1990s when he suggested that the old system of putting kids with horrible parents into orphanages might not have been all bad.
Hey, it’s a hard-knock life.
But here in the “U-S-A, U-S-A,” we go a good bit of the way down the road toward saying parents own their children. They’re not allowed to f**k them, starve them or torture them, but those are pretty much the only limits. If the parents are full-out Trumpanzees who don’t want to admit to reality, they can fight the schools on things they have no business arguing.
If the school says kids need to wear masks, that’s really not a matter for discussion.
Especially now that it’s becoming obvious with the Delta Variant that children are susceptible to the virus. Some have died, but even if it isn’t fatal, it’s painfully obvious they can be hit with long-term effects as well as passing the virus to older people when they leave school.
It has been said that parenting is the most important job we have, and with the possible exception of commercial fisherman or lumberjack, it may be the most difficult. It’s maybe the only job we can fail at and then be reminded of our failure every day for the rest of our lives.
I’m sure 2020 was a very trying year for parents whose children had to do school from home (as opposed to homeschool), and I’m equally sure those parents were glad to have their kids actually return to the classroom. Of course, that isn’t the point. The point is that wearing a mask or not wearing one should not be a political statement. Any parents using their children to advance their own political views are pretty awful parents.
Until yesterday, I was fortunate enough not to know anyone who had COVID-19. Now I know two people my own age who have it, and I seem to recall not wearing masks was a choice they made. Both of them are pretty fit, though, and I’ll pray for them to get through it.
My own grandchildren spent an entire year in the Washington, D.C., area, and they did their schoolwork from home. My daughter and her husband were also home full-time learning Arabic remotely. Now all eight of them are in Tunisia for three years. Parents and the two oldest children have been vaccinated, and I’m hopeful the four younger kids will get their vaccine soon.
They have been and will continue doing everything they can to protect their children.
Just as everyone should.
Too many people are making too many excuses for their own bad behavior.
It needs to stop.