Heather Christena Schmidt

I feel as though we have really reached peak bullshit in this pandemic. It is exhausting to even just get up in the morning, let alone live, breathe, and witness the rampant stupidity that seems to now be at the wheel in controlling this thing.

I’m here today to say: it is never too late to defang this stupidity and change course.

You Can Still Get Vaccinated

I am by no means asserting that all people unvaccinated are morons. Let me be abundantly clear on this: that is not what I am saying. I. Am. Not.

There are a host of reasons people are not vaccinated still in the United States, as well as the rest of the world: poverty, access, eligibility… you name it. Even here in the United States, it’s estimated that a fair percentage of those unvaccinated would like to be, but work seven days a week and simply just are unable to afford any time off to do so. Also, no one under the age of 12 is currently eligible for vaccination; and I think we are grossly underestimating how many people that truly represents in this country.

But there is also that lawless group of mouth breathers who have the access, have the ability, and who have just folded up and said: NO. These are the morons, the mouth breathers, the plague rats that are keeping this going in an endless circle of chaos, destruction, and death – because this is what they live and breathe by.

These are the people that have covered their Facebook profile photos with banners that say “proudly not vaccinated,” who respond to news articles about the death of a child from COVID with the laughing emoji, and who walk into stores coughing all over everyone without a mask on and say really stupid things like “I identify as having an immune system.”

Morons.

You Can Still Implement NPIs

NPIs – for those unclear – are non pharmaceutical interventions. Things like social distancing, stay at home orders, masks… these are the things that are tried, tested, and proven to be effective in mitigating and slowing the spread of epidemic diseases.

I’m not advocating for “lockdowns” (which, let’s be clear, we never by definition had in any corner of the United States, with perhaps the exception of the Navajo Nation for a couple of weeks last year). I’m not even really advocating for stay at home orders, with vaccines and more medical treatments becoming available, of course some mitigation can/should loosen.

But limitations on capacity in indoor public spaces and masks seem very reasonable solutions to the newest surge of COVID being seeing in virtually all of the United States. And the misrepresentation by politicians and public health professionals that they were gone for good was, frankly, irresponsible.

So why won’t governments, private businesses, and public health agencies do them more assertively now?

Well, for one, they screwed up. If I know anything about contemporary American culture, it’s our unique inability to ever admit when we have done something wrong.

The newest rash of idiots taking center stage at this shit show we call life though are politicians, public health officials, and corporate stakeholders making the argument against the assertive and targeted use of NPIs in public spaces because: “we can mandate masks all we want, we will still have people refusing to wear them., so therefore we are choosing to do nothing”

[crickets]

“We can’t make seatbelts a law because some people will still not wear them” is what y’all dumbasses sound like when you say you won’t make public health guidance that is consistent with tried and true, evidence-based science, because a couple of hillbillies that probably have the collective IQ of a salad bar won’t follow said guidance.

You Can Still Open Schools Safely

Let’s be clear on this: the opening schools plan in the United States is not safe. This is the problem with stateside rugged individualism, and the inability of our government and broader community to rally around doing at least this is perhaps the blackest of marks that will go on our permanent record. Why is this what I believe? Because it is going to kill innocent children.

The refusal by some states to put in place any and all safety measures, and others to not offer alternatives, hybrid, and synchronous off campus instruction for students uncomfortable with returning to the classroom is something I continue to have a difficult time wrapping my head around.

Now those of you that have been around a while know that I have homeschooled my own children for more than a decade at this point. But the fear, terror, and abject horror of so many friends and family members – scattered all over the country – as their kids are being given virtually no options, or being sent into the classroom with masks optional, ventilation a joke, and distance an idea that never crossed anyone’s minds – is really starting to get to me. It is unconscionable, and for most of the summer I just could not understand.

Until I realized it was all about the money.

If kids are still given the option to stay home and still have access to an accredited teacher and all of their materials, yes you will still have a lot of parents (1) claiming unemployment every week, and (2) not returning to the physical office, continuing to work from home instead. I can see wanting to avoid this scenario before the current surge that involved a more transmissible variant affecting kids.

But the silence and the refusal to revisit school reopening plans now that cases and hospitalizations in kids are seeing their own exponential growth – both in heavily vaccinated and uvaccinated… masked and unmasked communities – is a level of ignorance on the part of policymakers, teachers unions, and education administrators that borders on criminal negligence. And it pokes holes in their previous arguments that any measures last year were about anything other than protecting only themselves.

I am not even sure who everyone seems to think will stay with the kids at home as they go in and out of quarantine from exposures, outbreaks, and positive tests themselves. 14 days is a long time to take off work unpaid, and the disruption our children have in store for them to their learning is perhaps even more profound than at any other point in this pandemic.

You Can Still Take the Politics Out of the Pandemic

I keep hearing people say the real shame in all of this is that the virus and the pandemic have been politicized. In a voice that sounds like the village idiot, or Sheriff Barney Fife on Andry Griffith, everyone just says “well I dunno what to do now that this whole thing has been politicized.” [shrugs shoulders and picks nose]

The real simple solution is that we stop using that excuse. Just stop. Stop politicizing it. Stop using the politicization of it as an excuse.

Policymakers can stop determining their policy by whether or not it’s favorable.

Local politicians and public health officers can stop tying what measures they take to whether or not their constituency polls favorably on it, or if there is a segment of societal mouth-breathers that won’t comply.

We are at what I believe to be the most dangerous point of this pandemic. It is the most chaotic, the most unhinged. This is the time when we have the most unknowns of what is to come: where projections are proving themselves wrong in all directions, and the science is continuing to change rapidly, while policy is not changing along with it.

Overarching all of it, though, is that our collective idiocy has taken the forefront of the conversation, or rather it’s taken over. Remember what Einstein said about the next World War: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Everyone keeps on calling this a war, and at this stage I do believe this could be argued as our third World War. It is unrelenting, it is resulting in mass casualties, and the enemy is literally everywhere. But if this is a war, we are fighting it with stupidity, and that is why it is taking us all down. When all of this is over, if it’s ever over and if any of us are left standing, we will have to have some very serious and broad conversations about education, and our failure in it over the decades to adequately prepare ourselves to defang this stupidity.

That is if it doesn’t eat us alive first.