The pandemic has slashed open and rendered exposed the twisted mindset of our society that religiously believes in a free and unfettered private market economy, with the sole exception of obligating the government to essentially provide free daycare for 60 million children

And I don’t mean to say that to dismiss or ignore the dedicated and invaluable work of millions of public school employees, but at no point in this conversation have any of these people even suggested they care about them or what they think

No one is actually debating the value of school teachers, the entire argument is these ghouls, these absolute monsters, not wanting to admit that their entire free market model requires on the single largest (and one of the most successful) social services in history

There has been no talk about course plans. No talk about standardizing telework. Or providing equipment and resources. Or even more money. It's 100% about "get kids back to the people we see only as babysitters" because it's literally all they care about.

And if you haven't caught onto it, why this is all coming up should be obvious: they're starting to realize with no plans and no improvement it's going to be another year of this. They're not going to be ready to bring kids back for next fall and they're terrified of open revolt.

Because you really, really can't blame parents here. What can they do? They've gotten no relief. Half of them are declared "essential" and have never had to stop working on-site as normal. There's no backup plan. The entire model is an agent of the state watching your kid for you

Teachers don't deserve this. The parents don't deserve this. And the kids, the majority of whom have died from COVID are non-white, don't deserve this, least of all to be cannon fodder for David Brooks' most overtly racist op ed in recent memory which is fucking SAYING something

And all of this exposes that wound, festering, blistering, revealing they see only two options: people stop working, which just CANNOT be done, so guess the only other choice is to kill a bunch more kids and teachers, because, whaddaya want, we've already tried NOTHING ELSE

The biggest irony of all of this is, they're only getting away with this because we still have a functioning society. If they were trying to implement this policy on the Snowpiercer or something a thousand people would be decorating lampposts already