No Way to Grow Up

But money can fix the problem given time. Lack of money can, of course, fix nothing over time.

The overall tone and style of this article is just... I don't know.

As a parent of elementary school children, I spent 2020 and 2021 seeing this stuff first-hand. Having arguments with other (non-parent) liberal friends on social media. Once they discovered that I was out of step on this one item of the current moment's orthodoxy, suddenly I was "voted off the island" altogether.

It was surreal. People who I thought were personal friends, a lot of their minds just flipped like a switch, and suddenly I was immediately and completely shifted over into the "right-winger" mental bucket. It wasn't just the "you think of school as free daycare" ignorant assumptions. I had friends assume that my views had changed on abortion, climate change, etc.

I still can't wrap my head around some of those conversations. I have completely abandoned social media, cut myself off from the vast majority of what I thought was my social support system, and discarded any delusions about political or cultural identity fundamentally having any bearing on human nature.

The New York Times was ONE OF THE PRIMARY DRIVERS of my social cohort's orthodoxy, to which I had become a heretic and outcast. To go through all of that, and then read an article from the same New York Times, echoing the same heresy? FUCK YOU. It's just too much.

I've noticed over the past few weeks that this article's main thrust is taking shape and being established all over the place as the new orthodoxy of the current moment. All of these harms were seen and known even at the time, a year and a half ago (my children aren't seeing a therapist for nothing), and were downplayed or dismissed outright. It seems unfathomable that the narrative has flipped around 180-degree so abruptly. I believe that the focus on harms seen in minority children is the loophole, or "new information", that seems to give people mental "permission" to change their viewpoint now.

The brutal truth is that in Year 3, even most progressives are reaching the point of being "over" the pandemic. So they are able to open their eyes and minds a bit. I don't know whether that enough for people to revisit the attitudes and assumptions that they were making back at the time. I don't know whether I even want to reconcile with most of those old friends even if they do. But it makes me sick to my stomach watching the NYT shift and slither from one zeitgeist to the next.

I live in a state that has had a fairly restrictive approach to COVID - my kids were in remote learning for about a year and we had two periods which could arguably be called "shut downs." But our fortunate circumstances made it so that I do not feel like it was particularly difficult for our children. As a result I have not reacted very strongly to local authorities continuing very cautious policies regarding masks and cohorting in schools. I was initially perplexed by the very strong reactions against the same among my peers, but am coming to understand that, like what this article points out, it has been very difficult for other children.

I'm seeing the opposite. Most public officials and news articles seem to only care about case numbers, which have very little meaning these days.