Reply to The Urgency of Normal

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One of the things I most appreciated about this document is the idea that we need to think critically about how both Covid precautions and, importantly, [i]the way we implement them[/i], impacts kids mental health and ability to learn and function.

So much of the conversation around Covid precautions in schools is divisive, angry, reactionary. This is so stressful for kids. And yes, I am aware there are conservative jerks who drive a lot of this. But I live in a very blue area where there is basically no resistance among school families to things like masking and testing. People get frustrated with the way certain things are implemented, but there is no meaningful opposition to Covid precautions.

Rather, where I live, most of the combative, disruptive behavior is coming from people on the left (I'm on the left! I really disagree with how these people are handling things). And their behavior is really harmful to kids. It's really awful to be telling kids "If you get Covid, you die." When it's not even true! Kids and vaccinated + boosted adults have lower or equal risk from Covid than the flu or, in some cases, car accidents and other threats to safety. Think how damaging it is for kids to communicate this message to them. We should instead be emphasizing the effectiveness of vaccines, showing them how great it is that our society came together to develop these vaccines so quickly. Talk about how kids are at lower risk of Covid so they don't have be stressed or live in fear of the virus, and how that's such a relief to adults to know that kids are less vulnerable to this virus.

I just think a lot of people have become so addicted to doom, and are constantly fighting an imaginary war with Trump or anti-maskers or anti-vaxers

(whether they are in your community or not, which, they are not in my community) that they have lost sight of how their behavior is negatively impacting kids. It's like parents who have become so caught up in the conflict with one another during a contentious divorce that they are fighting over custody without every recognizing that the best possible thing they could do for their kids is chill the heck out.[/quote]

So true.[/quote]

DP and yup.  I agree entirely.  I live in a very blue part of deep blue MoCo, and I'm still not sure why so many of my educated, self-described progressive neighbors think that "school isn't daycare" is a progressive position.  These are people who wear KN95s outside, all the time, and glare at anyone who doesn't, so their contact with the reality of COVID-related risk is tenuous.  It's very harmful to kids to see both the anger AND the disconnect from science and evidence.[/quote]

What I have learned from the pandemic is that the progressive left is deeply misogynist. The position of the left on childcare and education in this pandemic was appalling.

History is going to show that children did better in red states in the pandemic, and that is terrible. And I'm a lifelong Democrat.[/quote]

The problem is simple. In March 2020 Trump and Republicans (wrongly) downplayed the pandemic and so Democrats took the opposite position. Unfortunately, now that the situation has changed--we have more data about the low risk among children, vaccines, etc.--the most far left (including many of our leaders in the DMV) continues to dig in their heels as expression of political affiliation. We have weak leaders. We cannot fear being shamed for asking reasonable questions about whether certain mitigation strategies are doing more harm than good given what we now know. It is unfortunate that pandemic policies have become political weapons. The lunacy of it frustrates me to no end and I'm not sure how we break free of it. Just because some extremists were anti-mask in 2020 does not mean we should be shamed into having mask optional policies. People are stuck in their ways.[/quote]

DP, and I don't think it's as simple as you claim.  I completely agree with the PP above you about the deep misogyny on the left.  I admit to being truly shocked by how misogynist so many of my "feminist" friends are.  I'm also a lifelong Democrat, and realizing how many other "liberals" truly despise working mothers continues to be painful.  I mean, I know those on the right thought we were garbage, but I didn't know how many on the "left" agree with them.  That's not an easy problem to solve, in part because so many of these people see liberalism as their identity, and aren't willing to confront the inconsistencies between said liberal identity and the policies they support ("school is not daycare!").[/quote]

The realization that the left is as virulently misogynist as I traditionally have considered the right is painful. [/quote]

+2, though I'm not hugely surprised. What has amazed me is how quickly people on the left decided to paint middle class working mothers as the enemy in this debate. I think 10-20 years from now people will recognize there is little difference between how many on the left talk about moms who "hate their kids" and "just want free childcare" and the "welfare queen" rhetoric of the 1980s and 90s. It's the same BS -- using mothers (specifically mothers, not just women, not just parents) as examples of selfishness and greed in order to paint your proposed policies as reasonable. But just as Reagan conservatives (and later, infuriatingly, Clinton dems) wanted to use welfare queens to deny basic social services to most Americans, today's liberals want to use working moms as a scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong with their Covid policy. And yes, to drive women out of the workforce and strip even the existing family social supports away.

I swear, if this whole thing ends with public education no longer being a guaranteed right, I am doing to try to emigrate back to my ancestral homeland. I'm not raising my daughter in a country where  if she gets pregnant, she'll have conservatives denying her access to abortions, pre and post natal care, and parental leave, and the liberals denying her access to public schools. What the hell.[/quote]

Yeah, I applied for my kids' birthright citizenship in another country after watching Democrats gleefully trash public education. I already didn't trust the right, but now I don't trust the left as well. [/quote]

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