The parents of small children need to micromanage themselves—the grown-up, adult parents’ need to keep their children safe.
By Nazarul Islam
America’s government has for the past eighteen months, looked at me and all the other parents in my situation, as if to say: “Good luck with all that.” Employers have looked at parents of small children and determined that they need to micromanage themselves—those grown-up, adult parents’, who need to keep their children safe.
Public schools are still dithering about whether they will require vaccinations and mask use this fall (My son likes to send his son to a private school that will require both, because that’s just the only thing that makes sense), but it’s unlikely that any school will require proof that parents are vaccinated before they send their unable-to-be-vaccinated ‘Dennis’ to spread the gospel of Covid-19 around elementary school.
This fall, just like last fall, the burden of the coronavirus will fall disproportionately on parents. It’s parents who will have to treat every sniffle or cough as a potential life-threatening disease; it’s parents who will be guessing at the efficacy of expensive “home” “rapid” Covid-19 tests; and it’s parents who will be trying to juggle “everything is back to normal” work schedules around periodic weeklong school quarantines because some other family just had to drag their kid to church, or Florida, or a church in Florida.
Children are thorny little disease vectors, who cause parents to lose sleep many, many nights. In the best of times, the apprehensions are that once they go back to school, you can count on their bringing home a little Delta variant, to their vaccinated but not invincible parents. Some of those parents will be forced to go to work; some of those parents will not wear a mask while out and obviously, we’ll get another entirely predictable wave of Covid cases. And our cycle of high class, stupidity will continue.
In a society that has cared about children, everybody would be masking up at least until the vaccine were available to all children. Safe, in-person childhood education is arguably the most important social institution that needs to “get back to normal.” It can’t be done effectively remotely (or at least it wasn’t).
Educating our children through this crisis should be our No. 2 priority, behind only keeping people from dying from a preventable disease. Making it safe for kids to go to school is more important than going to church, a temple or synagogue, the mosque or a ballgame, or dinner and a movie.
But to get there, we need people to care about other people. And perhaps, that’s where this country always fails.
Last weekend, my best friend and his family were supposed to go on vacation. But their kid (who is the same age as my youngest) was exposed to Covid-19 at camp, a day and a half before their flight. The kid didn’t get the virus (according to the rapid test), but still, the exposure was there. According to all the weak, politically compromised guidelines, they were still allowed to travel, but they canceled their trip.
Even though they were vaccinated, they knew that their kid, and thus the whole family, was at an increased risk of spreading Covid-19 if they traveled one measly day after a case was confirmed in their community. So, they didn’t. They did their little part to keep from spreading this awful illness to people they don’t even know. My friends, the born liberals to be sure, weren’t willing to go out there and risk giving some unvaccinated (MAGA) child Covid-19 just so they could have a trip.
Thing is, I don’t think my friend is special. Indeed, most parents I know would have done the same thing. It’s the people who won’t who are quite literally ruining it for everybody else. The thing that is keeping the disease going is not the Delta variant of Covid-19; it’s the ass…. variant of humanity. And there’s no vaccine for that.
[author title=”Nazarul Islam ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nazarul-Islam-2.png”]The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.[/author]
