#school closures
One shift in the public pandemic discourse that has been very noticeable to me is that people on the Left/progressive/taking-COVID-more-seriously side of things are much more willing to be nuanced than they were, say, from two years ago through fall 2021. There’s more of a recognition that there is such a thing as too much paranoia and/or restrictions being too stringent, that the experts get things wrong enough that there’s room for doubt on the effectiveness of certain rules, etc. There’s much less of a “if you disagree with me, you don’t care about human life!” attitude in response to disagreement. In particular, I was at a party of very socially progressive people recently where two of them were teachers who were talking very openly about just how badly children/teenagers/parents have suffered from remote learning in public schools – on social, mental health, safety, economic, and educational levels – and it struck me that this most likely would have been a dicier conversation a year ago if anyone in the room got some idea that the teachers were suggesting that these harms came anywhere close to the value of HUMAN LIVES.
And this is a good thing. But I’ve been feeling more and more heartbroken and gut-twisted over just how badly children and parents of children have been harmed by all the remote learning, especially in light of a lot of mutterings that it seems not to have mitigated the spread of serious illness as much as previously insisted. And I keep thinking about how the generational wars 10-20 years from now are probably going to have a lot to do with a new generation of adults (the one that comes after Gen Z) who have suffered pretty serious trauma from how messed up their schooling was during an intensely socially formative period of their lives, to the point that they’ll bear a grudge against the older generations for screwing them over so badly.
But… (here’s where I veer into more of a very speculative stream-of-consciousness thought and away from the very heavy issues at hand)… if this new generation adopts the same kind of political/social “moral purity” mentality that my generation has developed and retained, then we can point out to them that such a mentality (justifying everything in terms of mitigating risk to human lives from the virus) brought about the (arguably) botched response to COVID that screwed them over in the first place.
