Often times, no matter how much bitching and complaining we as ‘Muricans do about politics, when the day is over, not a lot really happens. A penny tax doesn’t mean people are unable to feed themselves, and when the government talks about some convoluted bill or law that passes, most of the time very little noticeable things actually occur. Maybe it’s naïve and insular for me to make such blanket statements, but at least in my little world, the things that happen as the result of stalling and bickering in Washington seldom really feel like they affect life on the home front.
In a prior post, I made a remark about how at no point in the history of my life, has it ever felt so physically tangible, the feeling of disappointment and letdown happening to the American people of the United States until more recently. As stated, no matter how much I may disagree or not like something that’s now law, a lot of the time it doesn’t really impact the daily living of my life or my family.
Until now.
My wife is a teacher. My child is immunocompromised. I’ll just state those facts, and if you understand why this is a major problem today maybe you’ll continue reading. If not, well go fuck off.
Usually, the nonsense that the baked potato in charge spews on a daily basis is tantamount to the edgelord in everyone’s friend group that tries to say inflammatory shit every now and then because they want a reaction and they want attention. So often times, it seems like Congress or the Supreme Court suppresses the really terrible things he tries to pass, and they sometimes pick their battles or keep score of what they agree or what they disagree on.
Again, most of the time, things don’t really affect daily living on my front, other than wonky tax returns and a feeling that my country of birth hates me more because I’m not white, and an ensuing increased empathy for black people.
But when the baked potato has decided that schools are required to go back to work this fall, in spite of mountains of evidence pointing towards it being a bad idea on account of the fucking coronavirus pandemic that’s ravaging the country, then it finally hits home, directly.
It’s like the baked potato has sprouted 3.5 million arms and is directly reaching into the homes of every teacher in America, and is brusquely pushing them towards an edge of a cliff towards their eventual death.
And because this awful directive is coming directly from the fucking president of the United States, there’s literally nobody higher to escalate disagreement to in every school in America. Teachers can’t go up to principals, principals can’t go to superintendents, supers can’t go to boards of education, boards can’t go to state, state can’t go federal, federal can’t go to the whatever comes up next and next and next, because ultimately the directive is coming from the literal top.
The fucking president of the United States is forcing people to actively go into life-jeopardizing conditions, and has successfully politicized a commonsense situation, and twisted it into yet another artificial battle between people with conservative Republican values versus those with liberal Democratic views.
Except the difference is that 3.5 million-plus teachers throughout the country are all at risk, and they’re going to be surrounded by the much more millions of children across the country who are expected to go to these schools, and coronavirus will absolutely never fucking end and America will continue to be the bastard country in the world that nobody wants to allow citizens into their own.
Over the summer, I said that gyms were about the worst places to re-open when idiots thought that the pandemic was contained enough to start opening shit back up. But that was the summer, and nobody has worn enough masks to get this shit really under control, and now we’re nearing the fall when schools should be in session ordinarily, and things aren’t just not getting better, they’re worse than they’ve ever been before. America has blown away the global competition when it comes to how badly they’re getting decimated by coronavirus, while countries all across the globe are beating it otherwise.
But schools are definitely the worst places to re-open, because gyms are places in which people still voluntarily go, but schools are places where millions more people are expected to go in the fall, as it’s the American dream for kids to learn and become smart and gain the knowledge they need to grow and succeed, and if not for anything else, it’s the child care that parents all across the country pine for, whether they admit to it or not.
It’s flabbergasting to even try to expound on how bad of an idea reopening schools are, yet here America is. And the baked potato’s stooges and cronies that he’s filled the swamp with are all in 100% agreement, and everyone who wants to get in the baked potato’s good graces are all aboard, and we’ve got a large part of white, childless/grandchild-less America completely onboard with reopening schools and literally condemning people to their eventual deaths.
Ultimately, what my disdain boils down to are the insane number of lives of children that are deliberately being put at risk on account of this asinine stupidity. And because this is just another flagrant example of systemic racism, as it’s pretty abundantly clear that the vast majority of those who will be worst affected are poor kids and families which happen to correlate with higher numbers of minorities, this is basically low-key racial genocide in a manner of speaking, as blacks and Hispanic children aim to be the worst hit, when they’re forced to go to school because they don’t have adequate internet, technology, or their parents simply can’t stay home because they have to work in order to make ends meet.
We in ‘Murica have gotten to the point where the lives of children are now seen as expendable pawns in this despicable game of politics. I’m pretty sure those who hurt children are seen as the lowest form of scum inside prisons, and yet here we are outside the bars, casually accepting that children are expendable.
Ultimately, my wife and I have a general plan for the immediate, but when the day is over, I’d rather her quit and us struggle through single-income living until she can find something else, than have her go into a petri dish of a school and be exposed and potentially bring something back that can affect our infant child.
This is probably something that doesn’t even come into play in just about every other civilized country on the planet, but then again, none of them are necessarily ruled over by a walking baked potato with an ego as frail as a 13-year old’s self-esteem with hordes of like-minded sheep following their every word.
I hate saying it every time the words formulate in my head, but there’s absolutely no other way of putting it:
America sucks.
(right now (hopefully not later))
