An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy. – Steven Weinberg
Considering the endless crap I took for what turned out to be ultimately accurate pandemic predictions, it’s quite tempting to launch into the kind of I-told-you-so tirade that would surpass the likes of Lee Elia’s legendary Cub fan smackdown.
But the truth is, beating those “experts” was simply a matter of letting the ego go long enough to apply a basic statistical analysis, study previous pandemic progressions, and learn basic pathology from frontline medical workers, who ironically, I also proved to be ultimately wrong.
Should you review my daily First Ward coronavirus reports, you’ll note I surmised that:
- COVID-19 would evolve into more contagious and less lethal forms.
- The mitigations, particularly masks and lockdowns, would be pointless and only forestall the inevitable.
- Like the 1918 flu, the coronavirus will be with us for a very long time.
- The disease specifically kills those with comorbidities like obesity and senior citizens, not healthy people.
- Children were at no risk for dying from COVID.
- Well-ventilated schools would not become “superspreader” sites.
- You can’t catch COVID outdoors.
- The “experts” became addicted to publicity and made increasingly dire predictions as a result.
- Herd immunity was, is, and will always be the only way out of a pandemic
And none of that was rocket science, either.
But my most prescient forecast was how the cure would become so much worse than the disease, particularly in regard to the ensuing economic and remote learning devastation. And now that those chickens have come home to roost, all those self-proclaimed “experts” are disavowing themselves of their former declarations faster than Republicans can distance themselves from Donald Trump’s Mar a Lago stash.
Since we’re all going through it together, there’s no need to delve into the wanton economic destruction. But we will discuss how the mitigations forfeited a generation of children, and how those zealously complicit school boards and Democratic nanny-state politicians so desperately want you to forget their role in gleefully administering that pain.
To put it mildly, the effect of remote learning have been dire.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics and the federal Education Department, standardized test results have plummeted to levels not seen since the 1990s, with math scores decreasing the first time since those assessments were mandated in the 1970s. As you might imagine, minority and poor children, those who could least afford it, suffered even greater losses.
The two-year absence of structured physical education classes has had an equally deleterious effect. One recent study concluded that, “Short-term changes in physical activity and sedentary behavior in reaction to COVID-19 may become permanently entrenched, leading to increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in children.”
That will eventually kill far more of these children than COVID could’ve on its best day.
In a truly tragic irony, the Chicago Tribune just reported that hospitals and ICUs are being inundated with children, and particularly asthmatic children, suffering from common respiratory diseases like the enterovirus or rhinovirus. It’s gotten so bad in some cities that sick kids have been turned away from five hospitals.
So, why are these typically mild pathogens wreaking so much havoc this year? After being forced into isolation for two years, children weren’t able to develop the expected immunity to these eminently common bugs.
But as bad as those setbacks are, they pale in comparison to the mental health impact of two years of needless remote learning. Last December, the U.S. surgeon general took the unprecedented step of issuing a rare public advisory warning of a “devastating mental health crisis” among American teens. They said that depression and anxiety symptoms doubled during the pandemic with crisis prevention hotlines buckling under the weight of increased calls.
Meanwhile, it can take months to see a school psychologist and I dare you to try to get an appointment with a private adolescent therapist.
It was all so pointless, too. Teachers’ gave up on their students the second the going got tough, but despite their ominous shrieks of classroom plague havens, it never came to pass. The British Medical Journal concluded that, “The emerging consensus is that schools do not seem to be amplifiers of transmission, and that cases in schools simply reflect prevalence within the local community.”
Yale law professor and Bloomberg columnist Stephen L. Carter put it perfectly when he recently wrote, “In other words, even if we adults are selfish enough to punish our children to protect ourselves, closing the schools doesn’t seem to have protected us from much of anything.”
So let me be the first to call this unfortunate group of children “Generation Lost,” because the medical, psychological, and physical issues thrust upon them by self-serving and self-righteous adults have only begun to manifest themselves. Just wait ‘til they start seeking employment, not to mention the inevitable increase in mass shootings.
A great portion of the blame for this needless waste of lives lies squarely at the feet of the “experts,” who sacrificed our children to advance their own careers, and the elected officials who turned COVID into a holy war to get reelected. But the bulk of the responsibility for this massive failure goes directly to our school boards whose sole purpose is to protect – not destroy – our children.
Oh! They’ll turn bright red and tell you they were only following Health Department advice, but what kind of counsel would anyone reasonably expect from mediocre-at-best government bureaucrats intent on avoiding any risk that would cost them the only well-paying job they could get?
How far has “I was only following orders” ever gotten anyone? The irony there is the school boards charged with turning our sons and daughters into critical thinkers couldn’t apply the least bit of that logic to themselves.
Put more simply, how did I manage to get it right, while they all got it so wrong? Considering the blood on their hands, I don’t understand how any complicit school board member can bear looking at themselves in the bathroom mirror.
Though it’s unfair to single one out because no local school board had the cojones to do the right thing, the Geneva D304 was the worst. They avoided parents by violating the Open Meetings Act, former board president Taylor Egan regularly taunted and derided parents from the dais while her peers said nothing, and current board president Mike McCormick would wink and nod at pro-mitigation parents only to turn around and do the same to the other side.
Then he did absolutely nothing. Didn’t Dante reserve a special place in hell for those, “Who in times of great moral crisis, remain neutral?”
But now, with the terrible toll becoming abundantly apparent, the perps who’ve doomed Generation Lost, want you to forget all about their handiwork.
You barely hear a peep out of the school boards that once reveled in making all manner of public pronouncements. State and local health department directors seem to have come up with a similar case of laryngitis. Complicitous teachers are trying to act even more innocent than a sixth grader who got caught cheating on a math test, and you won’t catch Governor Pointless bragging about his mitigation orders in his never-ending series of campaign ads.
But we can’t and won’t forget.
It’s hard to believe that school board candidates start circulating their signature sheets on September 20 enroute to the April 4, 2023, consolidated election, but that electoral clock does keep ticking.
So, I’m once again, asking good and reasonable people to rise up and run for their local school boards because our children cannot afford any more of the current lot. Dissent isn’t a bad thing, but it only gets you so far. If you’re interested in running in Geneva, I do have a reasonable campaign managing records and I know how to beat that inevitable union money. It’s not very difficult to find me, either.
Regardless of how it’s done, every last one of the school board members who so easily and callously sold out our children by doing their best to destroy them needs to go.
