The common refrain during this pandemic has been “The kids are resilient! They will adapt, we have time to recover later!”

The kids are not resilient in the face of endless lockdowns, virtual school, and the stripping of friends and family and social interactions away from them. The numbers on youth suicide are reaching shocking levels. How can dead kids be “resilient,” I ask you?

In the course of world history, child sacrifice has been part of some of the most barbaric practices. We are seeing the 21st century version of child sacrifice. The mental health and physical well-being of our kids is currently being sacrificed to satisfy the fears and demands of adults. Those who have no power, authority, agency, or voice are being ignored, run over, mocked, and left out by those who are making the rules right now. The teachers’ unions are full-out resisting going back, even as Joe Biden makes tepid noise about sending kids back to school sometime by the end of the school year. Other governors, who have been in thrall to the teachers’ unions, are experiencing some kind of unknown change of heart. The data has existed for months that despite the labeling of children as snotty little germ factories, schools are not super-spreader locations, especially not elementary schools. The science has not changed, so what has?

The politics have changed. The Bad Orange Man can’t be blamed any longer. Democrats know full well that they will have to assume the responsibility of the current situation – which is why the arbitrarily stupid “100 days” was tossed out there. What will change about our understanding of the virus in 100 days? Nothing. We already have therapeutics working and a vaccine deployed (with a second one poised for authorization any minute now), and teachers are being moved to the next phases of vaccine distribution.

So of course the teachers are willing to go back to the classroom. Right?

Wrong.

In Chicago, the teachers’ union is fighting a plan to begin returning some studens to schools early next year. “Obviously, if school is continuing remote, there’s less urgency around the vaccination,” said the Chicago Teachers Union’s president, Jesse Sharkey.”

To get around this problem, Chicago apparently plans on hiring somewhere around 2,000 new employees (many of them non-union) to SUPERVISE the children in classrooms while the teachers continue to stay home. The weird thing is, others suggested this very same idea before the beginning of this school year, in order to bring the children back to school. I myself brought it up in a school district Facebook group, and got roundly yelled at by teachers who insisted that they were the best trained for classroom management – but they couldn’t POSSIBLY go back, it was too dangerous.

The goalposts keep moving, and the kids are being sacrificed. And the older kids know it.
https://twitter.com/marlo_safi/status/1339598038122201088

Data accumulated globally has shown that infections did not surge when schools reopened, and the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said as much in late November when he called on schools to reopen. While many private schools have reopened completely or partially, some of the nation’s largest school districts are still closed. In Washington, D.C., the city’s teachers union rejected an agreement with the public school system to reopen campuses in November. In Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Topeka, San Diego and multiple other cities, districts put off their plans to reopen in mid-November and gave no set date for reopening.”

In an essay (private school teacher) Eileen’s daughter wrote about her virtual learning experience, she describes the despondency and defeat students and teachers feel. In some classes, students mute their audio feature to hide the fact that they’re playing video games instead of paying attention. Teachers have difficulty holding students accountable, making flouting the rules easier. Eileen’s daughter, an aspiring writer and accomplished student, also faces her own waning motivation.”

“Every minute I sit at my desk I am being erased. It started with one of my dimensions. Then my voice was replaced by the chat, my face with a logo, and my life with progress checks,” Eileen’s daughter writes. “Virtual school is not real school. They are not giving us an education. They are teaching us how to not get caught using google translate. They are teaching us which websites will do your algebra homework for you. And if the Board of Education doesn’t take my education seriously, then why should I?”

Megan Knoll, a nurse in Minnesota, said she has watched her 12-year-old son slip into depression.”

“As his English teacher put it in her latest email; ‘sorry for all of the emails, but, I just want to say good job! WE can do it!’ No, actually, we can’t. We are breaking,” she said.”

The mental health aspect of this pandemic and school shutdown cannot be ignored. If every school shooting that results in a death is a preventable tragedy, then what should these suicides be called?

Do you know the names of London Bruns, Spencer Smith, or Christian Robbins? They all committed suicide. But like Chicago’s forgotten victims of gun violence, no one knows their names. They are COVID deaths, just as surely as anyone who died of the virus. These teenagers all died due to the effects of the virus, caused by the lockdowns for the safety of the adults in charge around them.

In discussing the mental health of these students with a friend just yesterday, he reminded me of the Ursula Le Guin short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” In the story, the happiness of Omelas depends on the misery of a single child, which the entire population must accept in order to maintain their utopia. Those who can’t accept it “walk away” toward the unknown. It’s a dystopian analogy that we are now seeing played out in real time. Except that the single child is thousands of students, and they are collapsing under the strain that those adults have forced upon them for “the greater good” of keeping the adults healthy. Not to mention that the adults in charge are even debating the ethics of who should be saved first.

And the kids have no one in power who speaks for them. Their interests, their socialization, and their mental health will be sacrificed on the whim of the adults who proclaim their belief in science, and then refuse to act on that belief because it will upset the teachers’ unions.

How will kids “bounce back” once they’ve been broken? And what will it take for people of conscience to “walk away”?

Featured image via Anemone123 on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license