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.”