The elementary school nurse and I were close, no introductions
necessary. I’d pop into her office, feeling fucking awful, with a fever
or a cough or earaches. She’d slip a new plastic sheath on the
thermometer and stick it under my tongue. We’d wait for the machine to
beep that it got a reading, and then she’d spring the sheath into the
trash can next to her desk with the click of a button.
I’d listen
to my dad’s tinny voice on the other end of the line during their phone
call. Then I’d lay down on the vinyl blue recovery couch with fresh
paper liner, the Texas air conditioning goosebumping my arms as I
anxiously waited for my dad to drive the 25 minutes from his work to my
school, to take me home.
This was mostly why I was unhappy to be
sick: because I knew that meant my dad was going to have to miss work.
No one ever made me feel guilty about it, but I always got the feeling
that it was a bad thing. And wherever that feeling came from, I
internalized it. I spent a lot of youth feeling like my ailments were a
financial burden on my parents. I remember crying the time I tripped
while running in an indoor bounce house in sixth grade, falling on my
right arm and injuring it in some indiscernible but painful way. As I
waited on the sidelines, my best friend’s mom saw my tears and said I
must have been in a lot of pain. Really, I had gotten to thinking about
how expensive a broken arm would be for my parents and had started to
cry, but I was too ashamed to tell her. I was 13.
Despite my
uncanny ability to get sick as a child, I don’t actually think it was
for any special reason. Getting sick is just something that kids do as a
function of their existence, along with having small, squishy brains
and a desire for instant gratification. The death squad — the group of often-but-not-exclusively Republican leaders
who would rather minimize pandemic deaths than give people money to
mitigate them — knows this. They know that opening schools in the fall
and requiring in-person instruction will get kids sick. Despite this,
the death squad has renewed its commitment to throwing the most
vulnerable people to the side, this time by saying, “fuck these kids.”
The squad found itself a louder leader in Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who told a radio station last week that, yeah, the plan is to just let kids get sick. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, emphasis mine:
In an interview on Friday with talk-radio host Marc Cox
on KFTK (97.1 FM), Parson indicated both certainty and acceptance that
the coronavirus will spread among children when they return to school
this fall. […]
Parson’s comment on the coronavirus
signaled that the decision to send all children back to school would be
justified even in a scenario in which all of them became infected with
the coronavirus.
“These kids have got to get back to
school,” Parson told Cox. “They’re at the lowest risk possible. And if
they do get COVID-19, which they will — and they will when they go to
school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.”
Also: PPE is a triage procedure, ie it’s done to make a shitty situation slightly better when there are no other options available.
With schools, with workplaces, with anywhere that’s not immediately medically necessary, there is a very obvious alternative available to forcing people to wear masks: cancel the events entirely, make it so people don’t gather in close proximity, pay whatever needs to be paid to make that happen.
“yes masks are really inconvenient and uncomfortable, that’s why the government should be paying every single person to stay at home so they won’t need to wear a mask!”
Read & memorize the last paragraph. This is how you fight a culture war: you don’t take the position they set up for you, you use the kernel of truth they’re weaponizing, & weaponize it against them. It’s political Jiu Jitsu - you redirect your opponent’s momentum against them.
Expanding on the ‘ppe is a triage procedure’ point
Ive taken a few occupational health and safety courses, and in my province there is a mandatory Worker Health and Safety module from our Ministry of Labour that needs to be completed by every worker. One of the things that these teach is hazard reduction in the workplace and, surprise, a lot of the concepts are easily applied to hazard reduction literally anywhere.
Hazard reduction comes in multiple flavours: elimination, substitution, engineering, administrative, and PPE.
As we see on this useful graphic: these various methods of controlling hazards have different levels of effectiveness. Setting aside elimination and substitution as they can’t apply to the current topic, the most effective control is engineering, which is applying whatever infrastructure changes are necessary to keep people away from the hazard. This is the ‘government pays everyone to stay at home’ method. Following that is administrative controls, which I figure mandatory social distancing falls under, though only if its actually enforced. The least effective method of controlling a hazard is personal protective equipment.
Let’s do a quick metaphor: say you work in a factory which has recently been filled with bees. The bees came in the factory on their own and there are so many of them that working is almost impossible. Removing the bees will take a long time, but there are people working on that. In the meantime, your boss told you that you need to go back to work, and that you should wear a mask because there are bees. This situation ends with the factory getting sued for failure to ensure a safe workplace, and losing.
If the government refuses to do their due diligence in regards to the health and safety of their citizens, there should be consequences scaled large enough to ensure that it never happens again.
They’re telling me how many kids they think will potentially die based on corona statistics where children were not going to school during any of the heights of corona because it wasn’t safe … and now we’re at levels worse than we’ve ever seen …
and then they want to say it wont overwhelm hospitals that’re already overwhelmed to a point where people with chronic severe illnesses, pregnant people, etc. are dying because they can’t gain access to legitimate medical care.
And they want to cut federal funding to schools who don’t open, schools that are primarily funded by the value of the property around the school … meaning the richer the area the longer the school can stay closed … meaning the poorer schools have to open
meaning they’re forcing open schools who can’t afford paper and printer ink and sending them there with no real protection, no real PPE for teachers, students, or staff, schools that can’t even afford clean drinking water for their children …
And they think these kids wont get sick en masse, get their parents sick en masse, get the schools staff sick en masse, in areas where again the hospitals are already overwhelmed to a point where disabled people, people with chronic illnesses, and people who need their health monitored are already dying en masse and they want to throw more corona cases at the fire
And they don’t want me to call that genocide?
This is genocide by biological warfare, it’s not that fucking hard to see.
And let me get this straight
… instead of asking why people are being forced to go to school, forced to go to work, forced to go shopping, being evicted en masse, not being provided actual safety gear at their jobs?
instead of asking why our government in the richest country in the world isn’t providing effective PPE for essential workers, instead of asking why our government isnt paying people to stay at home, instead of asking why the government hasn’t issues rent freezes, instead of asking why our government isn’t providing meals? etc. like other countries have …
… much of the media would rather spend all our time talking about the stupid people we see at walmart not properly wearing a mask? and folks are actually feeling smug about that being their primary concern?
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
