Well I Reckon…
The New York Times released a report on Monday that confirms what should have been fairly obvious from the beginning: The COVID-era school closures were a disaster for children’s education, they lasted longer than necessary, all while only providing a marginal [perhaps even negligible] benefit in preventing the spread of the disease.
I saw some of this first hand — my wife is an elementary school teacher, so while we were both teleworking in the early days of COVID, I worked upstairs while she tried to wrangle a class full of 5th graders from our living room over the internet. I’m no expert in early childhood education, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that this was a sub-optimal learning environment, especially for any child who had any sort of academic challenge already. I was also sort of obsessive about research of the virus, so I was aware that [for one of the few times in history] children seemed blessedly unaffected by a novel pandemic virus. But I wasn’t sure what exactly to do with that information, y’know? The fact that children had better outcomes with COVID was only half of the puzzle — there was still the matter of adults of varying ages that actually run the school that would be at risk. So I just figured that while it was less than optimal to try to teach school children remotely, it was the least-bad option available at a time when there was an unusually deadly virus for which we had no vaccine or effective treatments. Sometimes there are no good options. Life isn’t fair, etc.
That charity and understanding was not infinite, however. While I wasn’t one of the people in the fall of 2020 who was clamoring for in-person education to resume without an actual improvement in public health metrics, I did personally think that once vaccines were readily available to educators in late 2020/early 2021 [especially after we prioritized educators in the vaccine roll-out] that in-person schooling should resume. Various school districts around the country disagreed, usually urged on by teachers’ unions.
I mention all of this because now that no less a liberal institution than the New York Times has admitted that school closures had poor educational outcomes, there is an almost celebratory anger from certain corners of the Right hoping that now, at long last, we can finally have a “reckoning” on COVID and really show those lefties what for. And I just…think they’re going to be disappointed. Again.
There will be no COVID reckoning, I think, for three main reasons:
COVID was such a socially traumatic time that I think most people would rather just not talk about it instead of bringing it back up, four years later, to score political points.
There is no single entity to make the object of COVID frustration.
People who were mad about COVID mitigation policies were mad about them in places they either did not live or in places where they have limited political power.
Taking those in reverse, it seems to me that COVID mitigation policies roughly aligned with the preferences of the people that lived in those jurisdictions. There were a lot of people in Red States angry about, say, the Chicago school system. But given that they don’t live in Chicago, their anger was pretty pointless. Similarly, there were writers for National Review complaining about policies in New York City, where their vote was outnumbered 8-1.
Similarly, given that COVID policies were often set at the city, county, or state level, it diffused [though not necessarily defused] a lot of the anger such that it didn’t really translate into a noticeable electoral effort. Which is to say, if you’re a parent in Chicago annoyed by the teachers’ union, you might take that out on a school board election, but are you going to hold the mayor, or governor, or any of your federal candidates responsible? Thus far it seems like no. Ron DeSantis made his handling of COVID a major component of his campaign, and even aside from everything else, no one seemed to care.
Also, it seems to me that the two “sides” of the COVID debate diverged so widely and so quickly that even if someone wasn’t particularly satisfied with the COVID regime where they lived, and was inclined to base their vote on it, the “other side” was also too far from their own position to warrant joining it. Once COVID mitigation became a tribal signal, things got incredibly, incredibly stupid. We reached a point where fully-vaccinated people were wearing two masks in public, mostly as a signal to others that they were “taking COVID seriously,” in response to the proudly-unvaccinated jackasses performatively coughing on the store employee who gently reminded them of the store’s mask policy. As I often joked at the time, COVID mitigation policies reminded me a lot of the George Carlin bit about how anyone who drives slower than you is an idiot and anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac. I went to a concert in D.C. in the summer of 2022 where I got tut-tutted by an usher because I’d forgotten I was supposed to be wearing a mask even though I was fully vaccinated [and by that point had been boosted]. It was annoying because there was no medical reason, much less a public health reason to be wearing a mask inside a room full of other vaccinated people, but what was I gonna do? Vote for a vaccine crank in Virginia because I was annoyed with the mayor of D.C.?
I think the chief reason there will never be a COVID “reckoning,” however, is because most everyone would rather just forget it ever happened. You might have noticed that there’s not a lot of mention of COVID in popular media. It’s not a plot device in [m]any television shows or movies. A similar thing happened after the influenza pandemic in the late 1910s: Millions of people around the world died of a virus for which there was no effective treatment, and everyone just sort of tacitly agreed to never speak of it again. Having lived through COVID, I appreciate the sentiment.
As I said, it was a socially traumatic time. We learned a lot about our fellow countrymen, much of it bad. A percentage of the country that still baffles me, more than I ever would’ve expected, was simply “ugly” about it, as they say in the south. Did school closures last longer than they should’ve in some places? Yes. Is the predictable result of that a large amount of educational delay for many children who lived in those areas? Also yes. But if we’re going to have a “reckoning” about that, shouldn’t we also have a “reckoning” about all of the people who refused to do anything to mitigate the spread of COVID? Which is to say, if you’re going to complain about the duration of school closures and you’re not also complaining about all the people who refused to get vaccinated or otherwise lower their odds of being a vector of disease, it’s difficult for me to take that seriously. Just because the New York Times can now admit what was fairly obvious by the summer of 2020, that doesn’t justify or legitimize the sheer crankery from a lot of the people now spiking that football. I can’t really envision a satisfying political result from all of this, so failing that I would rather just call it even and never bring it up again.
They Are Who We Thought They Were
Multiple people sent me this article about how Trump supporters feel about him mocking Joe Biden’s stuttering. It’s not great. I mean, the article itself is well done; I enjoy John Hendrickson as a writer. But it depresses me. [Also, I feel sort of bad for John. He talked at the book signing of his that I went to about how he has interests other than stuttering that he would like to write about. And yet [this is me talking now] the guy writes one article about Joe Biden stuttering, and now he’s been pigeon-holed into the “Trump makes fun of stuttering” beat.] Anyway, a sampling:
I asked [one Trump supporter] if he had seen Trump’s comments during the Georgia rally, and specifically, if he had seen Trump imitate Biden’s stutter. He saw it all. “I think he’s got every right to do whatever he wants to do at this point,” Todd said. “The level of, uh, cruelness, may seem tough, but they’re being very cruel with him, so it seems justified.”
His wife spoke up. “I disagree, because I think when you make fun of people, it just makes you look bad,” Cindy said. “It’s not the Christian way to be,” she added a little later. “I just feel like it makes Trump look bad, when he’s probably not a bad person. But he is just stooping to their level, and I don’t like it.” […]
I struck up a conversation with a woman from Cincinnati named Vanessa Miller. She was wearing a T-shirt that read “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” and a dog tag inscribed with the serenity prayer. She hadn’t seen, or heard about, the clip of Trump mimicking Biden. “Trump is a good man,” Miller said. “He’s not perfect. Biden is not handicapped. He’s just an ass, and he does not care about this country.” She went on, “If Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it wasn’t about a disability. It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.”
A bit later, she told me that “Biden doesn’t stutter; he’s mentally incapable of running this country.” But then she did something surprising: She reached out and grabbed my arm in a maternal fashion. “And I feel what you’re—I feel what you’re saying,” she said, acknowledging my own stutter. “People that are unkind to people with disabilities, it’s shameful. It’s awful. Absolutely disgusting. And I guess I understand that, like, in an election, you know, it gets ugly, and elections get competitive, and people say things, people do things.”
I unlocked my phone and showed her a video of Trump’s stuttering impression. She turned her focus to the mainstream media in general. She said that “for the press to inflame and use disabilities to get people riled up is exactly what they want.” Nothing would stop her from voting for Trump. […]
First off, [expletive] you, Vanessa. You sound like a gross person. But more generally, of course no one who is already voting for Trump is going to withhold their vote from him because he makes fun of Joe Biden’s stuttering. Even if, much to my chagrin, they know people who stutter. As I said last week, “if you’re fine with the infidelity, the porn star fornicating, the serial dishonesty, the business fraud, the sexual assault, the petty corruption, the nepotism, the conspiracy mongering, the affinity for authoritarians and despots, the criminal indictments, the impeachments, the attempted autogolpe, and the fomented attack on the Capitol, you’re not gonna abandon him because he makes fun of stuttering.” There’s not much new field to plow here, as it were.
But it did get me thinking about stuttering as a “disability.” I’ve always struggled with the language around stuttering. I’ve never liked calling it a “disability,” not out of any sort of pride, but more that I feel like I’m [for lack of a better word] appropriating. I don’t feel disabled, even if I could technically claim it. Stuttering is like the Aquaman of disabilities — I mean, I guess it counts, but it’s not one people usually think about. There’s been an effort in recent years to completely remove stigmatizing language around stuttering, which I support to a point — but it can start to feel silly. For example, I’m on board with not calling stuttering a disability, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me to call it a disorder. If it gets much beyond that, it starts feeling like a psychedelic-fueled dorm room discussion.
Why even call stuttering a disorder, man?
…uh, because my brain acts in abnormal, i.e., disordered, ways when I speak?
But what even is normal?
…the way that literally 97% of adults do it?
But why even call it anything, man?
…because it is a thing? It shows up on brain scans and everything. It is a diagnosable condition.
But why not just call it, I dunno, a difference?
Isn’t that less descriptive? That conveys less information than the other terms.
Why does it need to be defined at all?
Because human beings use words to communicate ideas and it’s important to differentiate meanings of ideas that aren’t the same?
Maybe it would make more sense to me if I took mushrooms or something. Will report back.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: The American Revolution
Clue: Hanged as a spy on September 22, 1776, his body probably still lies somewhere in midtown Manhattan.
Nathan Hale
Today’s clue:
Category: Biblical Sayings
Clue: The concept of turning these weapons into plowshares is mentioned in both Micah and Isaiah.
Dispatches from the Homefront
I was on solo parenting duty the other night because my wife had the audacity to go see a show with her sister and a friend on a weeknight. [I joke because she’s on solo parenting duty for two hours every day until I get home.] It was totally uneventful and everything was fine, except that my younger daughter would ruefully ask “Mommy comin’ soon?” every 30 seconds.