I’ve been quiet for almost exactly two months, mostly due to the demands of life (guess who’s busy prepping for the return to in-person school) but also in part because I tend to struggle with explaining the obvious. Ask me to explain a complicated concept and I will take genuine pleasure in breaking things down in their simplest forms and walking through them step by step. But where the facts are readily available and obvious, I have a hard time.

So, I’ve been quiet. I’ve been watching, though. I watched us openly disrespect the culture and the people that we like to claim “put us on the map”. I’ve watched us treat migrants as if we don’t have a history of flooding the shores of other countries looking for a better life. I’ve watched as we beat up about the natural result of this nation’s complete disregard for meaningful accountability only to let it sink under the waves of whatever else took over the headlines within a few days.

And now, I’m watching us prepare to do precisely what I suspected was the plan way back in November: send all students back to in-person school without even offering the youngest ones the protection of vaccination. This, after the Health Minister declared that the government was liaising with stakeholders in January and then ghosted us for two months. As of now, all we know is that we’re getting pediatric vaccines at some point, but obviously not in time to actually immunise our children ahead of the return to school in three weeks.

Clearly, this is what inspired me to dust off the old blog.

The plan, as announced by the Ministry of Education, was to send Standards 1-4 back out on a rotational basis in order to make sure students are properly distanced. However, in the wake of Saturday’s press conference, where the Prime Minister revealed plans to lift almost all of the COVID restrictions, the Ministry announced yesterday that they would be reopening schools fully as of 19th April.

I didn’t really become alarmed until, sitting in a last-minute meeting yesterday evening, I realised that this was also news to the schools.

This is the part where I list obvious common sense things that should not need to be listed because they are… obvious:

• Schools that were closed for almost two years and have been serving only a fraction of their population since February need more than three weeks to properly prepare to serve their full population under normal conditions, let alone whatever weird-ass pandemic/endemic/let’s-all-close-our-eyes-and-pretend-it’s-gone phase we’re in now.
• Schools that were not properly maintained before the pandemic (and were likely fully neglected during it) need more than three weeks to deal with the peeling paint, mossy floors, malfunctioning septic systems and disintegrating furniture that are likely the situation now. They also need funding to deal with this.
• Schools that were overcrowded before the pandemic cannot reasonably be expected to distance a full class of students in the exact same facility with three weeks’ notice.
• Parents who have lost their drivers and childcare providers (because two years without the ability to do one’s job tends to inspire one to find another line of work) may need more than three weeks to make the necessary arrangements given that (if they were proactive), they would have been preparing for a rotational school schedule.
• I’m no longer a teacher, so I can’t speak for them, but I’d be willing to bet they have some feelings about being jerked around like this given the way this news changes their plans for how they were going to handle their curricula.

The thing that aggravates my spirit about stating the obvious is that I know any adult with common sense knows everything I just said. Hell, I’m sure all the kids who have spent the last couple of years watching adults behave as if we have no common sense know it.

So if we know it, why are we in this position? Why not just proceed with the original plan of a rotational return or finish the final term of the school year online and give schools, parents and children time to adequately prepare for a return to “normal”?

Well.

To answer a question like that, you have to consider the real purpose of the education system. Were it to make sure that all of our children were properly educated and prepared to lead happy, productive lives, a full half of my blog posts wouldn’t exist. The fact is, school is the axle on which our Capitalist societies turn. Though we often like to pretend that parenting concerns are niche issues, the reality is that there are a lot of parents out there who need childcare in order to work full-time. When those parents disappear because they’re at home with the kids, things get sticky in a lot of places. While babysitters and daycares are a thing (and they’re important), school is obviously the biggest warehouse for a nation’s children. If kids aren’t in school, lots of workers aren’t at work and lots of expensive commercial rental properties aren’t nearly as profitable.

This is how you get your Prime Minister saying he sees no reason not to fully reopen the country even as the country from which COVID originally emerged is experiencing waves of lockdowns and the countries who enthusiastically spread it across the world are encountering new variants.

To be clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t reopen. I want to reopen. I’m tired. Two years is enough. I want my daughter back in school playing with her peers and learning in an effective way. I want to be able to work undisturbed. Most of all, I want to be able to move through life without a piece of whatever strapped to my face and an inherent suspicion of every cough or sniffle within hearing distance.

However, if it’s not too much to ask, I would like to do that without disregarding the fact that there are still a lot of people in danger from this virus. And no, I don’t have to be one of those people in order to care about them because I’m empathetic like that. I’d like to be able to trust that the officials charged with guiding our return to “normalcy” are trying to safeguard their citizens’ health rather than their financiers’ (and their own) profits and real estate portfolios. I would like to see that the people we have entrusted with power actually care about the impacts of their decisions beyond the political costs.

However, given Saturday’s little national gaslighting session, during which the Prime Minister also:

• Attempted to pretend that the failure to implement a vaccine mandate was a considered choice (instead of a whole belly-flop);
• Dismissed a legitimate question about whether the pandemic had taught the government anything about managing the traffic that brings the nation to a halt twice daily with what amounted to “that’s life”;
• Responded to concerns about skyrocketing food prices with a reminder that he was previously criticised for telling us all to plant provision;

It is painfully clear that I am quite obviously asking for too much.