by Desiree L. DePriest, PhD.
Faced with the abject failure in developing a cohesive, national response to the pandemic and the metastasis of the dying economy, Donald Trump sees no life as important as his objectives. As chaotic as those objectives may be, it is hard to quantify why any adult would risk the lives of children while he completely piece-meals any cohesive plan to protect them. As Americans, the norm of most parents in our civilized society has been to protect our children at all costs. Historically, laws were changed to protect them from sweat shops and grueling work conditions. We established public schools so all children would have the opportunity to have safe opportunities for education. We will feed our children even if we have to skip a meal. More currently, we watch over them when they play in the parks. We now schedule play-dates with vetted and trusted families, and people of color have “the talk” with their sons. Children do not leave our sight without a cell phone with GPS to locate them. Simply put, we love and protect our children in America.
We are shocked and sickened when we send our children to school and experience the horrors of gun violence regardless of it happening at our child’s school or occurrences at any school. School nurses are required by law to notify the other parents when a student comes to school inadvertently with ‘pink-eye’ or other contagious diseases. These are all established and stable considerations made in the social contract of entrusting our children to the school system. This is quite different from the conscious knowledge that we are sending our children into guaranteed disease, like we have been told to do by Donald Trump.
Parents have an expectation that their children will be protected when sending them to school. In normal circumstances the potentiality to catch a disease at school is combined with medical remedies to cure them. Most schools require documentation of shot records and deny the children of anti-vaccine parents to attend the school. Education is not a laboratory test for COVID-19, or any other disease that has not been managed by the national agreements established to protect the citizenry through our Constitution, rule of law, and tax-dollars.
We are not living in the 13th century under King Philip of France who, with indifference, allowed a group of young children to go on a journey to preach the Crusade. From simple peasants on foot to boys and girls of noble birth with horses, the children set out on a great mission into the unknown. Many of the children died on the wayside. Others who were initially inspired by the Crusade became asymptotic, or reached a line where the cause was no longer affectual and tried to wander home. Some of the children became bitterly disappointed in the suffering and turned against their leader, crying that they had been betrayed. For the majority of the children, disillusionment set in along with the trauma of heavy losses. Not being able to find their way back home, feeling emotionally blunted, many of the children became vagabonds and prostitutes.
Organizing, ordering and sequencing is essential in any well-organized plan. This is not to suggest our children will not return to us if we send them to school with no surety of their safety. The consideration as a responsible parent is the condition in which they return home. It is also important to ask ourselves why returning to physical schooling is the urgent focus now versus back in March when most schools were closed. March would have been the intelligent time to organize and sequence a national plan for schools to reopen. In March, however, the children were not the first order of business for Donald Trump. The first order was denial that a pandemic existed in America at all, especially if we did not test for it. Focus was on massaging China in hopes that a 4,000 year old country would fall prey to his “nothing’s ever been done like this before” self-delusions on tariffs. When the virus began to affect the economy, and as China’s hoped-for financial windfall for America did not happen, adults returning to work was the next priority. Lacking the impetus to critically examine family dynamics in democratic (blue) states, Trump and his ‘666’ son-in-law had to be convinced that workers dealing with lower incomes or reductions in pay could not realistically return to work without childcare. This was a hard position to workaround because, Americans, including democrats, believe in safeguards for their children. If left up to Donald Trump, perhaps he would have been unconcerned with leaving them “Home Alone, 2” since his part was begrudgingly cut from the movie. There’s never been a grudge Donald Trump could not find room to hold in his gut.
The short attention span of Donald Trump still refused to put forth the critical thinking and extended effort to develop a national plan to strategically return to our social norms as Americans, even when the disease spiked in republican states. It was less invasive to his preferences for rallies and golf weekends to simply send the child crusaders back to school, COVID spikes or not. Similar to the King of France, indifferent to the ways and means, the school systems were haphazardly ordered to reopen within the ongoing non-national plan. In Donald Trump’s reality, the schools were essentially going to be the babysitters so the adult parents could get back to work – win-win – for him. No additional funding was offered for rapid implementation of school-starts, just the threat of taking existing funding away if they didn’t open – on time — as if we were living in the regular Dog-Days of a normal August.
Similar to the triple-headed dog Cerberus, guardian of the underworld, Trump is also resisting support of the Hero’s Act to protect the parents. The first head, called child detention, involves sending the child crusaders into uncertainty. The second head, called indentured servitude, states that if you want a home for your children, or food for them to eat, go back to the uncertainty of an existing or no longer existing job. Donald Trump’s last head of the dog, called indemnification, insists all schools and companies not be held liable for any health damages the children, employees or parents may incur. Let the guardian know when it’s done; he’ll be on the golf course – social distancing.
In the children’s crusades analogy, there were those adults who tried to help along the way. Pope Innocent received them but knew they were merely children and prone to folly. These were children attempting to fulfill a mandate given to them through trusting in the behavior of their adult examples. Empathetic yet firm, the Pope told them that they must go home.
The psychological claim of damage due to the lack of social interaction, becomes a moot point when applied to a sick or, lord forbid, dead child. If sick, they are quarantined which is far more psychologically detrimental than staying-at-home healthy, or doing virtual learning. If a parent sends their child back to school, resulting in the death of the child or adult employees, under the ill-gotten belief that Donald Trump is being truthful about the dangers of COVID, they will have to live with the abnegation of parental responsibility for the rest of their lives. Cerberus and the “Grim Reaper” do not value life above the underworld. The scientists are not empirically clear of the effects COVID-19 has on children but the CDC predicts 1,000 people per day will die at our current rate of dystopia. Asymptomatic does not mean damage to children’s bodies is not occurring and definitely does not prevent them from shedding the virus to others. This is a children’s crusade initiated by a desperate Donald Trump who is out of his underworld element but determined to recreate it. In scientific terms, schools are being used as petri dishes initiated by a desperate Donald Trump who we never see sharing family time with his young son or grandchildren. In authoritarian terms, it is Nazi-style experimentation initiated by a desperate Donald Trump who longs, like Cerberus, to be exalted above human-kind.
There are no guarantees of safety until the spread and spikes of this disease are addressed and subsided through a national plan. COVID is spreading everywhere in the United States - urban, rural, in trains and planes, in buildings. All we know now is that airborne infection can occur through the nose, the mouth and the eyes. Hands and surfaces, such as, door knobs and numerous objects in crowd-environments are fraught with contagious particles. Imagine the first-grade children in line to visit the bathroom. Even if only a few children at a time, it would be irresponsible to send such young children (on a crusade) alone and expect good hygiene. Would you trust someone to disinfect the entire bathroom each time someone uses it? How would they know when the older, self-sufficient students go alone? Were the bathrooms disinfected prior to your child entering? How would you know? If so, would that employee become infected? If set up similar to a valet, should parents insist on females to clean the girls bathroom and males for the boys? As the schools rush to hire new cleaning employees, should they all undergo criminal background checks? These are just questions about the bathrooms… Now consider the whole school.
Schools who are attempting to rush to reopen based on the dictates of Donald Trump, impervious to the reality that children are too frequently asymptomatic but very contagious, will have to make the same decision Pope Innocent made. Possessing the wisdom to know the children’s crusade was encouraged by the vainglory of narcissist adults and a recipe for disaster, the Pope told the children to wait until they grew up to fulfill such arduous vows. He knew the safest place for such young souls was at home. We could never apply Pope Innocent’s piety to Donald Trump. His proven characteristics would better align with those men who sold the child crusaders into slavery. For those who do associate Donald Trump with having empathy, don’t get angry should this guardian send your children into irreparable peril. Only a small number of children returned from the children’s crusade of 1212, how many will return healthy from the children’s crusade of 2020.