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EOS. BTS. SOS.


 

The Back to School Industrial Complex is upon us again. (Sorry.)  Shop for clothes and supplies. Donate so that others will be ready for school. Squeeze in every last minute of fun before the summer is over. Gradually adjust your family’s sleep cycle so that re-entry will not be too painful. 

Tired yet? Feel stressed? 

But wait, there’s more. The Baltimore Sun posted these two items on Facebook in a 24 hour period.



Newly reported cases of COVID up 50 per cent, hospitalizations up 123 per cent. Take your pick. Neither one is promising. I don’t have the local wastewater results, but I will look.

What does this mean for back to school? What do you think?

In the current political environment it has become harder and harder to encourage vaccination or even to get the general public to take COVID seriously. Caring for the wellbeing of others by masking and by staying home while ill is actively mocked. 

We still don’t have any where near enough research on (or successful treatments for) the long term damage of recurrent cases of COVID  and, even if we did, it has become the fashion to discredit and even defund scientific research. 

Welcome to 2025: survival of the fittest. Wait, scratch that. Make that survival of the privileged. You’re on your own, folks. 

And yet we shouldn’t be on our own. We should be caring for ourselves, one another, and our communities. We should care about people who are medically vulnerable. We should think about what will happen to children and young people who are being infected over and over again, K-12. 

While we are at it, we shouldn’t be sacrificing teachers, either. Just saying. 

Those who are vulnerable should die. Those who become disabled no longer have value. That’s what we are being told. 

Are those the values we want to teach our children? 

All in all, the dollars and hours invested in Back to School readiness are just about wasted if we don’t have the basic humanity to care for eachother.


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