Teach Your Children the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song from 1969 has always resonated with me. Musically is it light listening, lyrically, it hits hard. The meaning behind the words, as explained by Graham Nash in his biography, hits even harder.
"The origin of the song came from my recent infatuation with art. I had begun collecting photographs around that time, powerful images that had an emotional effect on me. One, in particular, was a Diane Arbus image of a boy in Central Park. It spoke volumes to me. The kid was only about nine or ten years old, but his expression bristled with intense anger. He had a plastic grenade clenched in a fist, but it seemed to me that if it were real the kid would have thrown it. The consequences it implied startled me. I thought, ‘If we don’t start teaching our kids a better way of dealing with each other, humanity will never succeed."
This song echos in my mind every time we face another school shooting, or another avoidable crisis of our own making - like climate change. What are we teaching our children?
You, who are on the road
Must have a code
That you can live by
In the age of Trumpism, it is evident what "code" so many are teaching them. Studies have been done showing the quantifiable uptick in racial aggression in schoolchildren since he slithered down his escalator, was embraced by their bigoted parents, and was elevated to office. They are not only being taught to hate "the other", they are being taught that it is acceptable to strike out at them.
And you of tender years
Can't know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so please help
Them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die
Fear is hate, hate is fear - one cannot exist without the other. They feed off one another, and they are handed down generation to generation like some badly fitting, out of style pair of pants. So what the children know is the irrational fears their parents were taught by their parents and on and on. As youth, they are submerged in it daily, and as such, are ill equipped to help their parents out of such an entrenched and abhorrent mindset. The only hope is that many of them break off from their parents as they begin to grow; that many of them will be exposed to the very people they have been taught to loathe and realize that the truth they have been taught has been a lie all along.
We are seeing that as young people have led the way on LGBTQIA rights, March For Our Lives, and Black Lives Matter. And while it is still the exception, not the rule, some are able to teach a new truth to their entrenched parents before those parents pass.
It should not be up to the youngest among us to act in the most mature and enlightened of ways. It just shouldn't. In a perfect world, the elders would be teaching our youth the value of one another, the equality, the differences that make us beautiful, not dangerous. In a perfect world they would all feel protected, cherished, loved. In a perfect world.
Sadly the latest lesson they are about to learn is just how expendable they are to the adults charged with their futures, with their country, with their well being.
It's not as if our older children are not aware of how little their safety matters to those who regulate our country. That children of all ages have been slaughtered in their classrooms and school hallways to little legislative effect is unconscionable. Blood is mopped up, buildings revamped, psychiatrists brought in for a period to "help" with the trauma, then what happens? We send them right back in.
And we wait. Parents hold their breath as they drop them off each morning and only exhale when they embrace them at the end of the day. Students endure active shooter drills that only serve to grind the fear and trauma into their psyches even deeper. They flinch when a book is dropped on the floor. They panic when an alarm goes off.
I raised three kids. I lived these fears for years and years and years, my heart constantly in a vice. I received the text messages when they were evacuated for bomb scares. I felt my heart drop to my feet when I got school emails about a possible shooter. And I know the extended trauma and guilt endured when a friend is lost to gun violence - even when it is self inflicted. My son still carries that day and the memories of those last minutes of his friend with him; he always will.
So our children, especially the older ones, already know we are an inept, powerless constituency that repeatedly rolls over and plays Russian Roulette with their lives each school day in terms of gun violence. Now they are about to see that acceptance, that impotence again roll the dice with their lives in the face of a still rampaging, deadly virus.
Schools reopening in a month. Even as Florida currently has a 31% positive rate of infection in children, while the entire population of Florida has only a ~11% positivity rate. Even as young people in Missouri are testing positive at higher and higher rates. Even as children lie in ICUs across the country. Even as CDC Director Robert Redfield said, "I do think the fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are going to probably be one of the most difficult times that we have experienced in American public health." Even as not a single legislator supporting this insanity can answer even the most basic of questions like:
Will schools provide PPE for children/faculty?
What happens when a child tests positive?
Will the entire class(es) he/she attends be tested? Who will pay for it?
What if a teacher tests positive? Will they all be quarantined for 14 days? Will the teacher be paid during this time?
What if a teacher or student dies from COVID contracted by mandatory school attendance? Who will pay for their expenses?
What enhanced cleaning regimen will be employed to insure everything is sanitized daily? Who will pay for this?
No one can answer these basic questions, yet the push is on to get schools back open and kids in the classrooms as fast as possible. Because the economy.
Make no mistake, in person learning is far preferable. Interaction with the teacher, socialization with the student body, special education teachers and students simply cannot thrive in an online only approach. So I completely understand the value of our schools. What I hate, however, is how our economy is dependent on our school system. That so many parents must view the school attendance of their children as a form of "free" childcare so they may work to support their families is just another indictment of our society, and how we prioritize, well, anything.
That we have no national approach to how we will reopen our schools also speaks to just how disjointed is our system, how much of an afterthought are our kids. Each school district is scrambling to slap together the guidelines their schools will follow which will be wholly different than the process one school district over. The CDC has provided guidelines, but Betsy Devoidofcompassionethicsintelligence, our Secretary of Education, has openly advocated for schools ignoring them.
Schools boards are voting down mask requirements for students. Some will make them mandatory. Some will leave it up to the parents, the kids. School districts are already requiring parents sign liability waivers. NOT. KIDDING.
And teachers are actively preparing wills in advance of being forced back into the classrooms. In Texas, where the governor has mandated a return to the classroom beginning in August, teachers are frightened. While parents of students may opt for them to do long distance learning, teachers are required to be in the classroom five days a week.
Steven Poole, Executive Director of the United Educators Association addressed this inequity. "Many of our teachers, staff, or their family members have underlying health conditions that would place them at severe risk of the contract COVID-19. While parents are given options to send their children to school or stay home for virtual instruction, teachers and staff do not have that option."
The Houston Federation of Teachers released a statement Monday, "It leaves the details up to the school districts, provides no additional funding, and does not even meet the low Threshold set by the White House in April. Houston educators are calling for a delay of in-person classes until other criteria are met, including the closure of non-essential businesses "to flatten the curve so that children have a chance of in-person instruction sooner rather than later."
In the face of this legislative indifference to their health and safety, teachers are writing wills, completing advanced directives, and acquiring additional life insurance.
Because they are considered as expendable as they are essential. And our children are just considered expendable.
Globally 1.5 BILLION students were affected when schools closed months ago. And I completely agree with UNICEF's observation that The potential losses that may accrue in learning for today’s young generation, and for the development of their human capital, are hard to fathom.
Many countries have successfully flattened their curve, reduced cases, and have low to no death count right now, but that's not us. We are the country that has now been banned from other countries. We are an incubus of viral plague that the rest of the world is shunning to protect its own citizens. That there are literal border closures against us at Canadian and Mexican crossings is irony at its finest. And even some of those places (Hong Kong, Beijing, etc) that reopened their schools with stringent guidelines for distancing, mask wearing, and sanitary protocols are finding themselves having to reclose as cases began to climb again.
Again, these are places where the virus was taken seriously, where shutdowns were fast and hard, where mask wearing was not turned into some bullshit political football, where public sanitization was/is carried out daily for months.
And then there's us. Bitching about haircuts and chicken wings, stewing in our own juices together over Memorial Day and 4th of July - our freedumb more important than our existence.
139,705 people dead. We account for 24% of the global death toll. 422 of every million of our citizens dead. 1 out of every 100 testing positive. Our hospitals on overload, ICU beds filled to capacity. Only now are we seeing mask requirements take hold - Walmart has finally announced you may not enter their stores without one. (Conservative heads exploding in 3...2...1...)
Our numbers are horrid and we know they are not accurate. That the Baboon Ass in chief has now ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC and send all COVID stats directly to him? Well, one could be forgiven for thinking that he is out to make his assertion that "One day it will just disappear" come true. Not because it has disappeared, but because our ability to track it has.
And right in the crosshairs of this attack on information are our children. Just as we are forced to send them back into the halls where they will now face down two deadly possibilities daily - gun violence and COVID - the confidence in any data will be nil. In the hands of a narcissist whose only concern is self preservation, the lies about our COVID numbers will be added to the pile of 19,000 other lies he has told since taking office.
Nash was so right. "If we don’t start teaching our kids a better way of dealing with each other, humanity will never succeed." Sadly, too many children will never grow up to help humanity succeed because far too many adults in charge were never taught a better way of dealing with each other, caring for each other, valuing each other.
There are school aged kids who will not make it to Christmas, hell, to Halloween because of this capricious view of their lives. They will contract COVID, some will never show a symptom yet transmit it to teachers and janitors and their families. Some will suffer horribly as multi-system inflammatory syndrome takes hold of their organs. And yes, some will die. As they take their last breaths on a ventilator, know that right up to the end they trusted the grown ups in their lives to protect them. But...
Don't you ever ask them why
If they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they loved you.
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