Is This The Reopening I Was Promised?
On 2/11/2021, the Twitter account @donkamion78 sent out the following Tweet:
This is bad: Forest brook Elementary teacher Teresa Holmes recorded a video of her classroom which has 28 desks now armed with plexiglass shields.
Attached to the Tweet is a minute-long video of the teacher taking a tour around her new classroom. As mentioned in the post, every one of the twenty-eight desks is covered with large plexiglass shields to stop the spread of COVID-19. It is also assumed all the students would be required to wear masks, remain six-feet apart at all times, and so on and so on. Like many attempts at reopening, this could only be considered a reopening in the most technical sense, and I have little doubt most of the students would much rather stay at home (or be in Hell, for that matter) than have in-person school in what is basically a want-to-be maximum security prison.
For those wondering, Forest Book Elementary is located in New York. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, most known right now as the man who got Republicans to admit COVID-19 deaths were being undercounted, has expressed desires to re-open for the past couple of months. On 1/11/2021, Cuomo said the following:
We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass. The cost is too high. We will have nothing left to open. We must reopen the economy, but we must do it smartly and safely.
This is especially odd because, during the Trump administration, Cuomo was looking for any reason to stay closed for as long as possible. In October 2020 while being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, Cuomo even said that a vaccine might not be a good enough reason for New York to reopen. So what changed? Why did Cuomo go from being one of the biggest supporters of lockdowns to one of their biggest critics? Well, it all just so happens to have started after Joe Biden was inaugurated.
Since Biden first got into office, Democrats have fully excepted the dogma of school reopening. The question is no longer if schools should reopen or not, but if they should reopen with precautions or not. However, while the Republican might not live in reality, the Democrat is currently living in some kind of weird middle, like a ghost can walk halfway through a wall before getting stuck. They understand that schools can easily become hot zones, especially for staff members, and yet they think the solution to just hope the students engage in unrealistic levels of compliance and that the schools have the money to enforce as many standards as possible. (Schools being underfunded has been a common Democratic talking point for years, funny how that just disappeared when schools are expected to spend a ton on COVID-19 protection measures.)
Over the past several months, it has become increasingly common to see schools take increasingly nonsensical measures in order to make in-person learning possible. Here are the conditions Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the CDC, said would need to be met for schools to reopen on 2/3/2021:
There’s accumulating data that suggests that there is not a lot of transmissions that is happening in schools when the proper mitigation measures are taken, when there is masking, when there is distancing, de-densification of the classroom, ventilation, contact tracing, hand-washing, all of those things, when they’re done well, the data suggests, the science suggests that there is not a lot of transmission happening in schools, and in fact, the case rates in schools are generally lower than they are in the population surrounding it.
There also wouldn’t be much transmission if you put every student in a giant hamster ball, that doesn’t mean it’s practical or even sensical. (Wait, did I just give the Democrats an idea?) If the only way to stop the spread of COVID-19 and have schools reopen is to make it so the schools have to undergo massive changes, many of which are rather costly, then maybe reopening schools isn't the best idea. Is that even an idea we’re allowed to talk about anymore without being burned at the stake for heresy against our new lord and savior?
This is what I mean when I call school reopening a dogma, all other goods, all other purposes, and all common sense must be sacrificed to this idea of school reopening. No matter the circumstances, no matter the nonsense measures that must be taken, all schools must reopen no matter what. Even President Biden is going along with this new nonsense agenda, and he was elected specifically to stop such things from continuing.
The only reason anyone has given for why this is good is in the name of “compromise.” (For those wondering why this argument is utter garbage, I’ve broken down both the false worship of bipartisanship and why it doesn’t apply to COVID-19 in the past.) However, for that to work one side has to actually be interested in compromise — which one side is not.
One does not need to look at the average anti-masker to find evidence of this (although the reason story of a woman in Colorado slapping an employee over asking her to wear a mask is a good example), one just needs to look at the Republican commentary sphere. One might remember this tweet from Allie Stuckley in response to two children sitting on opposite sides of a table wearing masks:
Purposeful dehumanization via desocialization. Makes the communism go down more smoothly.
Biden is not going to be able to “compromise” with people who think any restriction is communist. And you know what, looking at what I described earlier, I’m on their side. I would much rather be in my room in a call than in whatever Soviet Gulag style building Forest Book Elementary is forcing its children into. This should quickly be called out for the Orwellian hellhole it is and anyone who came up with it should be fired as soon as possible.
How would I describe my thoughts on school reopenings:
You know, that famous phrase? “The cure is worse than the disease.” That is exactly the territory we are hurtling towards. — Steve Hilton, 3/23/2020
Yes, that! If school reopenings are a disease and this is the cure, then the cure is no doubt worse than whatever illness we might catch.
