What Future Generations Will Remember About The Pandemic

We haven’t made our kids’ future important enough to inconvenience ourselves. And they know it.

Credit: Kiattisak Lamchan / EyeEm / Getty Images

I began writing a lengthy piece on the difficult decision of sending kids back to school, with four scenarios and decision criteria to try to help parents. Then I stopped because I started thinking about kids and what we teach them. I scrapped it for something much less useful.

I think about the things we all try to teach our kids:

• How to be safe
• Following the golden rule
• Showing consideration
• Using evidence
• Looking out for those less fortunate

And I thought, WTF are they going to say about us when they grow up? They are watching us invoke them and how precious their education is (it is), but they see we weren’t willing to work all summer to make their buildings safe. That we decided to keep bars open and spread Covid-19 even knowing it would be impossible to control come fall.

That the governor in Arizona threatened to take a school district’s budget if they didn’t open even after a teacher died there. That we have some studies now that show school age kids get and spread Covid-19 and the president still asked every school to be open even with high spread.

That we have data emerging that indicates there is medium or long-term cardiac consequences for even asymptomatic people and still decided to open schools in person. That we didn’t put together the tools — tests and contact tracing — to make them, their schools and their families safe.

They see that European and Asian countries have done those things. They’re smart. They’re curious. They’re observant. They know it’s not impossible. Do they think we can’t? That we won’t?

They can see or will learn that some here had economic and political reasons for wanting them back in school and that’s what mattered. That we ignored their teachers. And their aides, their librarians, their bus drivers. The adults we tell them to listen to.

They will learn as you will that the Koch Brothers has people tinkering with CDC plan on…