Two American Crises By Kyle Smith
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/two-american-crises/
Last January 6 was terrible. The ongoing abuse of our children in schools will do far more lasting damage.
A mericans are reflecting on two important crises this week. One, last year’s January 6 Capitol riot, was thoroughly investigated and its perpetrators are being severely punished. The other, the ongoing systemic abuse of our children by the Democrat-run education system, has been shrugged at, has gone wholly unpunished, and is barely acknowledged even as millions of us observe it in horrified disbelief that such hideous mistreatment can be official policy in the greatest country on earth.
One event was properly labeled something that must never be allowed to happen again, and it almost certainly won’t. (Because the Capitol Police will be prepared next time.) One event will continue every day, indefinitely, until Democrats finally get tired of subjugating our children and decide to stop.
The Capitol riot was a series of spectacular crimes that deserved spectacular punishment, as we at NR argued at the time. But what’s going on in schools is likely to do far greater long-term damage to America. The number of children being significantly harmed by nonsensical Covid restrictions such as closed schools, forced masking, forbidden talking at lunch, and canceled extracurricular activities vital for social, emotional, and physical development is in the millions. And how many young people are we killing by driving them into depressions from which there is no exit?
The invaluable David Leonhardt of the New York Times published this week a grueling summation of what pandemic restrictions — not the pandemic, which has more or less bypassed children — are doing to the youngest and most vulnerable among us. Every day our kids spend under this nightmare regime is a day of development that is lost forever. “Kids are resilient,” we tell ourselves. Are they? It seems to me something closer to the opposite is the case: Severe psychological traumas endured in childhood rarely disappear, and very often they mutate into major problems in adulthood. Psychologically speaking, kids are fragile. What kind of future are we building if we allow this horror to continue? It’s been nearly two years of this. How alienated, bitter, antisocial, and resentful are these kids going to be when they’re grown? We are poisoning our most valuable crop.
“American children are in crisis,” Leonhardt baldly and accurately states, citing sagging test scores, a spike in demand for emergency treatment of children, a 51 percent increase in suicide attempts leading to ER visits by teen girls, and anecdotal evidence of an increase in misbehavior by pupils in school. Yet some 2,200 schools are closing this week all over the country — in Atlanta, Cleveland, and some New York City suburbs. In Chicago, in-person classes are canceled. In Massachusetts, the largest teachers’ union is calling for school closings.
Teachers jumped to the front of the queue to get vaccinated on the understanding that this would “keep schools open.” The federal government turned over $190 billion to schools that would supposedly be spent on ventilation and other measures to “keep schools open” — equivalent to getting a $1,500 check from every household in America — and now, no one is quite sure what happened to this gargantuan sum. (One school in Texas spent $4 million on a new outdoor learning center that won’t be completed until 2024. New York City’s public-school system, which spends $28,000 per student annually, simply used its windfall to cover budget deficits.)
“It’s heartbreaking watching many elements of my kids’ childhood slip away while for most adults life is closer to pre-pandemic normalcy,” writes Bethany Mandel in The Deseret News. She is putting it mildly. That schools continue to trample on the interests of children by wrapping their faces in useless cloth, restricting their interactions, and telling them to stay home again is an abomination. None of these measures have anything to do with kids’ safety, because “children face more risk from car rides than Covid,” Leonhardt writes.
Sixty-one percent of schools in the top 500 districts still require masks (according to Burbio, which compiles data on schools), even though these items don’t do anything, especially the way kids wear them, and we’ve known for more than a year that very young people aren’t vectors for coronavirus in the first place. Educators who enjoy the right to go to any restaurant they choose — even in New York City! — and dine indoors, unmasked, with hundreds of others, are making kids eat their lunches sitting on the floor. Adults running the schools appear to be willing to rain down any kind of abuse on kids in exchange for even the most fanciful possibility of enhancing their own safety.
Let’s be sure to place the blame where it lies: Democrats are inflicting severe damage on our children, en masse, and we know they have no shame whatsoever about what they’ve already done because they keep doing it. Teachers and school administrators monolithically vote Democrat, and most of them belong to the teachers’ unions that are a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Which is why the Democrats’ CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, is letting teachers set policy based on panic rather than rationality.
Leonhardt’s previous columns have proven influential with elected officials and bureaucrats. Will the schools listen to reason anytime soon, though? I doubt it. The events of January 6 constituted a temporary crisis that was swiftly put down. The scarring of our children is a rolling disaster that is likely to continue for months, or even years.
Comments are closed.
