It’s revealing that a person responsible for representing a community’s interests would feel comfortable excusing themselves with the fact that that community’s infrastructure is approximately as old as the nation itself.
The truth we conveniently ignore as we roll up our windows and roll down the Beetham Highway — the truth we use our addresses, degrees, job titles and, if we’re lucky, assets to hide from — is that the gap between us and the people we like to look down on is A LOT smaller than the gap between us and the people who are supposed to be serving us.
We can pretend the decision to send unvaccinated children to school with maybe-vaccinated teachers has nothing to do with the steadily increasing caseload, but that doesn’t make it so. As much as I want my daughter to return to a life that allows her to interact with her peers and actually physically meet and spend time with her teachers, I’m not prepared to play dotish just to see the (much-needed) end of digital school.
Omission just gives fearmongers a chance to wrap their sensationalism around a tiny kernel of truth, putting the authorities on the back foot and undermining their efforts to do what needs to be done.
In the wake of an abrupt end to the State of Emergency, prominent figures in this country are comparing the implementation of ‘safe zones’ to South African apartheid even as we record our deadliest day yet with 28 deaths, including the first child to die from this virus.
In this context, I can understand why some might decide to rebel at the level of the final bit of power they have left: personal bodily autonomy.
What I don’t understand is why ✨this✨ is the bodily autonomy hill that has been selected to die on.
Hidden behind the air of “welp, we tried”, is an alarming shift towards returning to business as usual without ensuring that the most vulnerable members of our population are properly protected.
How does one account for the strange dissonance in telling parents that their unvaccinated children couldn’t attend in-person school while also failing to ask teachers if they’d been vaccinated?
We talk endlessly about being cosmopolitan but we rarely take stock of what that means, of the whole that is made up of so many parts blended together in a way you won’t find anywhere else.
Against the backdrop of SEA results released last week, in which almost 7% more students scored under 30% than last year, I wonder if we grasp what kind of whirlwind we’re preparing to reap if we continue to ignore the ways we’re allowing children to tumble into the gaping chasm between those who have the good fortune of meaningful educational support and those who don’t.