What is a School?
What is a School?
Drowning Children in A Pestilent Fantasy of "Normal"
Take a moment to answer the above question. Really try to imagine what the purpose of a school building is and hold it in your mind throughout reading this article.
Imagine if you will, a massive cube in the center of town. For six to eight hours a day, the federal government mandates the town's parents to place their children inside this rectangle. What happens inside of this large box is irrelevant to you. You have always known the children go inside this box, and this is a normal part of your routine.
Suddenly, a horrifying global calamity disrupts this normal routine. Many of your fellow countrymen are dropping dead from a new & mysterious illness, disrupting your normal routine. A small human being that you’re responsible for is now in your home for an extra six to eight hours a day. In truth, they're quite annoying, clingy, and frankly? Obnoxious as all hell. Why can’t we put them back inside the box already?
“…to be totally frank, my children were at my house all the time, and I was eager to dispense with them to an outside location." -Laptop Class Economist Emily Oster,
Freakonomics Podcast, Feb. 26 2021
You're told that the most important goal now is to get that child back inside of said rectangle and overwhelmed with propagandistic nonsense downplaying harms of the aforementioned calamity. What happens to the miniature human inside of this obelisk for 6-8 hours daily is irrelevant - or is it?
One would assume this rectangle serves some sort of purpose in the development of these small humans into fully grown humans. This would require dividing the children into separate rectangles contained within the central cube, and likely employing full-sized humans from the community to facilitate the development and education of these young minds.
The Growing Mountain of Pediatric Casualties
We're talking about schools in the nature of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. As the years have progressed since March 2020, our knowledge of the harms & disruptions that COVID-19 can cause to children, educators, and their parents - ranging from death to crippling disability to even neurological & cognitive impairment in developing young minds. This has not influenced policy decisions.
It is September 2023 & we are once again seeing how SARS-CoV-2 disrupts the functions of schools, with classes shutting down and/or going remote across America. This is the third summer in a row that the Biden Administration has refused to facilitate any measures to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission in schools, from respirators to HEPA filters, and we are seeing the results of that chaos as COVID-19 is now the leading infectious disease killer & disabler of children, with over 2,000 deaths & hundreds of thousands - possibly now well over a million children disabled by Long COVID. Hundreds of thousands of children also lost a primary caregiver, many because they brought the virus home from school & transmitted it to a loved one. Bereavement is the greatest contributor to a child’s academic hardship.
Deaths and disabilities aside, we also see how a philosophy of InfinityCOVID radicalism disrupts education, in a misguided crusade to shield employers from liability for workers’ health. Sick teachers can't teach, classes get combined into unproductive clusters, and many children even wind up in an auditorium and are left to watch intellectually unnourishing comic-book blockbusters. Some school districts, unable to maintain normal operation due to illness, have relied upon the National Guard & local police to serve as teachers - as if an unqualified man in body armor with a gun is somehow equivalent to a certified teacher with years of experience.
What’s worse is that, on a macro scale, we’re expecting teachers to grind their health into dust with an expectation of unlimited SARS-CoV-2 infections, multiple times a year - and the results have been disastrous, according to a Spring 2022 Education Week article, about 20% of educators are suffering from Long COVID induced disability, and teacher shortages are a nationwide problem.
The expectation now is that teachers will just drown themselves in pestilence to provide a sub-standard education for children that are also suffering from unlimited infections with a virus that crosses the brain-barrier and causes serious harm. We’ve trapped educators & students in nothing more than a sadistic, delusional fantasy completely detached from reality.
How did we get here?
You Will Learn to Love the Virus
There are more than a few nefarious wealthy interests who see the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as an opportunity to destroy public education, and more importantly teachers’ unions - a vilified "big bad" by those who have long crusaded against labor laws and workers protections as a whole. It doesn't matter how much human suffering the American people must embrace, especially as these wealthy interests bankroll an overwhelming amount of propaganda - from outright conspiracy theory anti-vax personalities to “enlightened centrist” liberal pundits to loudmouthed academic cranks that practice dishonesty and data manipulation to justify their conclusions.
The propaganda campaign for a return to "normalcy" was overwhelming, and Americans offered little serious pushback to the Biden administration's mandate of the mass, repeated infection of children with a virus that crosses the blood-brain barrier & can cause neurological & cognitive impairment. Over 2000+ American children are now dead because of SARS-CoV-2. Nobody has seriously bothered to question of whether or not schools are actually functioning "normally" or educating children through this ongoing calamity. Scott Balsitis from the “Urgency of Normal” insisted that everyone must get SARS-CoV-2 repeatedly, endorsing a policy choice of mass infection, disability, and death. Balsitis of Gilead Sciences has not paid for a single child’s treatment to recover from Long COVID disability.
Schools are shutting down across the country due to outbreaks. Teacher shortages are at an all-time high. Rightoid billionaires are profiting from making white supremacist propaganda part of the school curriculum. That isn't an exaggeration or hyperbole either - in one PragerU video, an animated Christopher Columbus, who was dragged back to Spain in chains by his own people for his many atrocities, insists that slavery was doing Africans a favor. This is what wealthy opportunists are filling the void in education with: ahistorical propaganda and outright racism.
Meanwhile, more and more scientific research piles up on how repeated SARS-CoV-2 infections harm a child's health and development. It was easy to type "open schools" from behind a screen in 2020. Nobody actually wanted schools to stay closed or remote for extended periods of time. Instead, we had a divide between two groups of adults - one that insisted on behaving like mature adults and doing what it took to kept schools open safely & with minimal harm, and another group, drunk on dishonest propaganda & immature sloganeering, was willing to drown America’s children in pestilence for the illusion of a "normalcy" mirrored by 2019, which was already terrible for many Americans.
The Biden Administration insisted on catering to the latter as a cover to divert pandemic relief funding to buy more military toys and urban assault vehicles for the paramilitary occupation forces masquerading as police departments. The same police that will be enforcing abortion bans, shooting unarmed Black Americans in the back, accusing peaceful protestors of terrorism, and abusing "civil forfeiture" to rob working class Americans. That funding could have gone to deploying engineering solutions & protocols to prevent schools from repeatedly infecting children & educations with a virus linked to brain, heart, & even genital organ damage.
Instead, we constructed a “new normal,” far worse than before.
The “Post-COVID” Chapter of American History
Our children are shouldering a horrific viral burden so the adults can live out an immature consumerist fantasy, and the long-term harms of endless SARS-CoV-2 infections will stick with many of these kids for the rest of their lives - when they grow up & start taking filling the halls of power, will this generation be at peace with what we did to them? What we were willing to do to them? All so some 78-year-old crusader for endless war, the militarization of police, unsustainable burning of fossil fuels, and brutal austerity can pretend he "ended" the pandemic? Or will they simply burn down the nursing homes, with us old farts still trapped inside?
Any serious political movement going forward will be faced to acknowledge that the foundational pillars of civil society are struggling to function under InfinityCOVID:
Meanwhile, opening looting of our public institutions' coffers, by those who championed drowning our children in endless pestilence, is running rampant in the chaos with Florida "school choice" vouchers paying for themepark rides and plasma TVs - and in Texas, right-wing agitprop is being included in school curriculums as part of "supplemental materials.”
Right-wing billionaires waged an overwhelming propaganda campaign to "defang" the virus in the eyes of the public, and attack any measures to fight it, from PPE to vaccines. Now the very basics of our society are struggling to function, from healthcare to education - and it was a Democrat President who marched our children into the depths of pestilence with this new deadly & disabling virus, with nearly all of them having been infected at least once already - some children are now struggling from their third, fourth COVID-19 infection.
As these fundamental institutions begin to crumble under the weight of the ongoing pandemic, we are seeing the “New Normal” that these wealthy rightoid pricks seek to construct in a "post-pandemic" America: criminalizing peaceful protests as terrorism, open looting of the public's coffers, white supremacist indoctrination of the youth, the deployment of surveillance drones on domestic civilian populations, and the rise of Bidenvilles across every major American city, with even some liberals advocating for what are essentially concentration camps for the surging homeless population.
To return to the question of this article, we are seeing a new answer to "What is a School?" being written: the dehumanization of a developing child to that of a stage prop for an elaborate fantasy of "normalcy," indoctrinated to accept the crumbling foundations of civil society around them, and any refusal to accept deteriorating conditions is to be criminalized & punished with violent force.
The lessons being “learned” are profoundly unhealthier than any imagined, unproven harms than an effective PPE respirator or vaccine could ever cause. The adults are declaring they will drown their own children in pestilence because they’re crippled by fear. To cope, the adults erected a fantasy of “normal” to pretend nothing’s wrong - and will threaten others with violence to force others, especially children, to serve as stage props for this elaborate fantasy, no matter the total cost.
History is littered with the graveyards of societies that embraced fiction over reality.
