Opening/closing school is a complicated Q right now, but the problem itself is clear:

Kids are truly suffering & as a society, children have never been our priority. https://twitter.com/annbauerwriter/status/1357525068071526400

Our own family is in a position of relative stability & privilege right now: our kids are in school in person most of the time. They have 2 parents that can support & help them. And yet, I've never seen them struggle as much as they have in the last year.

The larger loss of community, friendship, extended family, church life, social order, & predictable schedule has been incalculable. We've hunkered down & formed good family bonds, but these bonds can't replace others.

At the same time, my uncle is lying in ICU in a medically-induced coma suffering from COVID, fighting for his life. There are no easy answers here.

What we must recognize however is that our society didn't start with a baseline of prioritizing children's true needs. We didn't come into this crisis prepared to take care of them.

The horrible irony of all of this, tho, is that minimizing the problem has actually extended it. Rather than facing reality for what it is, we've denied & obfuscated.

Politicizing COVID has come at a cost. And the ones paying that cost are not politicians gaining benefit from it.

The most vulnerable are paying the cost of politicization: children, elderly, those w/out good healthcare, low-income workers, etc.

And we will carry this cost for generations. It will be decades before we fully realize what we've lived thru & how mismanagement has damaged us as individuals & communities.

So once again, character counts. Virtue matters. Integrity has real world consequences. Leaders must be people of courage, wisdom, self-sacrifice, goodness, truth, humility, & love. We bypass these to our own destruction.