Virtual Stupidity

I grow increasingly tired of the overly emotional, pathos laden drivel published about Covid-19 on a daily basis. I get that there are a lot of feelings tied up in everything that is Covid, but the constant stoking of emotions to drive specific political agendas is just flat out wearing on me.

So writing about the many child development mistakes out country has already made and is still currently making in response to Covid-19 is almost nauseating at this point. Not because the topic isn’t important, but because I know that by the end of the article I’m going to sound like I’m some weeping martyr, lashing out emotionally in defense of the poor, helpless children of America. And I’m really not that.

But at the same time, somebody has to say it:

At what point is America going to wake up and start seriously considering the ramifications of what it is doing to the social and educational development of our nation’s children?

Does anyone truly believe this works?

In a move that is becoming so common you could set your yearly calendar by it, schools across America are reverting to a mode of operation I fondly reference as “Virtual Stupidity,” allegedly due to the rising cases of Covid-19 nationwide. “Virtual Stupidity” is a series of mandates, lockdowns, and closures which force kids of all ages, all backgrounds, and all socioeconomic statuses, to basically stop attending any form of meaningful school in order to protect them from a virus that by any meaningful statistic isn’t dangerous to them.

Sorry if that comes off as an unkind characterization, but nothing cuts like the truth.

So just like in March of 2020, and then again in November of 2020, and then again in the fall of 2021, schools across the nation are once again committing to some form of shutting down in-person learning, mandating masks and social distancing in buildings that are still open, canceling all social gatherings, and essentially making preschoolers to seniors sit in front of iPads and watch videos of their teachers, instead of, I don’t know, maybe actually being in the same room as them.

All of this, as always, is supposedly being done to protect the country from a virus that the overwhelmingly vast majority of people will never experience as anything other than a minor cold, regardless of vaccination status. This is especially true for 5 to 18 year-olds, by far the most resilient of all age groups with the strongest immune systems, and thereby the least likely group to suffer any long lasting effects from Covid-19, the flu, or any other commonly transmissible disease active in our country.

And here’s the thing. It might be okay to shut down schools, activities, and social experiences for the sake of what amounts to a minor cold for most people but can, in fact, be a potentially serious condition for an incredibly select few…if doing so didn’t cause young people to lose out on anything important.

But honestly -- and I’m really, really hoping everyone reading this already knows this -- the true cost of “virtual schooling” and/or the massive alteration of just about everything related to normal in person learning, is colossal. Far greater than any potential danger that Covid-19 poses to 99% of those that actually have something at stake in the educational world.

We're doing this to children based on what science again?

Whether we're talking virtual school or in person learning with overly strict Covid regulations, let me lob a few “obvious grenades” which should be, well, obvious:

It’s not good for five-year-olds learning how to communicate for the first time to only hear and see their teacher speak in a muffled voice behind a mask.

It’s not good for five-year-olds to sit at home on an iPad only seeing or experiencing their “friends” through a screen.

It’s not good for middle schoolers to never work in groups and have to sit 6 feet away from each other at all times.

It’s not good for high schoolers to never have an extracurricular event like a dance or a graduation ceremony because we’re too afraid that someone might get sick while in attendance.

In a reasonable world this would all be such a given that it wouldn’t even have to be stated out loud, but with society sliding further down the slope of insanity on a daily basis, it's becoming more and more apparent to me that it does.

So here you go, I’ll say it:

The effect our society's mistaken response to Covid-19 has had on the overall development of children academically and socially is the greatest sin of our generation.

Read that again.

I didn't say the effect of Covid-19 itself, I said the effect of our society's mistaken response to it.

In other words, Covid-19 the disease didn't do it. We did it.

School boards across the country must recognize the ramifications of their actions

Let’s look at this another way: Do you think in 20 years Covid-19 will still be as prominent of an issue as it is right now? What about in 10 years?

I sure hope, and optimistically believe, that any reasonable person's answer to the above two questions is no.

So the question isn't if our society's misguided response to Covid-19 will end, but when.

Those who spend all their time fear mongering about Covid-19 like to pretend they have the intellectual high ground and condescendingly state that it will of course end once we "beat it" and it's no longer a "cataclysmic danger to society."

My response to that?

We're already there. We never left "there."

It's a very important distinction, but Covid-19 as a disease isn't currently, and never was, the “cataclysmic danger to society" that many insisted. That statement will upset people who have bought into the fear based narrative of the media over the last year and a half, but it's statistically and undeniably true.

Do you know how serious something has to be to truly be a "cataclysmic threat" to a concept as big as the one defined by the word "society"? Meaning ALL of human society?

The threat of nuclear annihilation is a cataclysmic threat "to society." An asteroid on a collision course with earth is a cataclysmic threat "to society." Another ice age is a cataclysmic threat "to society."

The threat of Covid-19 pales in comparison to those things. Covid-19 isn't dangerous "to society". It's dangerous to a subsection of less than 1% of people in society. In the annals of history the truly great threats to human existence would spit on Covid-19 if we were ranking them based on the true danger they present to society as a whole.

So with reasonable people admitting that Covid-19 won't be an issue to our society at some point within the next ten years, and knowing that by any reasonable metric you want to go by we are already in a place where Covid-19 isn't truly a threat to society as a whole, the only question becomes how long are we going to continue to react to the misassessed threat level of Covid-19 in a totally unreasonable and society devastating manner. Because that's the true danger. That's the true threat.

Does anyone think this is a little overboard? Anyone at all?

So will it be one more year? Three years? Five?

Sadly, I don't know the answer, but I truly hope that the seismic political shift it's going to take to pull us out of the media induced mass hysteria we're currently in doesn't start too late. We have to stop letting a disease that statistically has serious consequences for hardly anyone dictate life and legislation for literally everyone. We have to stop implementing mandates allegedly designed to protect us from Covid-19 from becoming the very cause of the greater problems that are actually putting our society at risk.

Life can’t continue to be disrupted for the vast majority due to a health issue affecting only an infinitesimally small minority. Life has to be lived.

Businesses have to do business. Communities have to commune. Workers have to work. And schools have to school. And I truly am sorry for saying it because I know it's as cliché as it gets, but at the end of the day, kids have to be kids.

Which means they have to be in school.

Which means we have to, you know, maybe think of the children?