They Don’t Care About Us
They knew damn well what they were doing. They knew it was frivolous, unnecessary. Other places haven’t done this, and they’re still better off than we are. I don’t mind for myself, so much, even though it hurt me, too. But I go out there and tutor these kids — I come into their homes, sit down at their kitchen tables and watch their faces go blank with nihilistic despair as they open the laptop. This website hosts worksheets, this other website is where you turn them in. Lectures? Office hours? No, nothing like that — just poorly phrased multiple choice questions that can be fed into an autograder, the kind of test where the hardest part is figuring out what the borderline-illiterate test writer meant to say. Don’t know who else is in this class. No, no textbook either.
Childhood is supposed to be a time of new experiences, social engagement, growth and learning. For the past year, every child in America has been essentially shoved in a closet with a stack of paperwork to fill out, and little to no instruction in how to do it. Don’t give me that bullshit about how hard the teachers are working — I live in what’s supposed to be one of the best school districts in the country, and the teachers here are doing fuck all. They upload a batch of PDFs they bought from a teaching supplies website without proofreading, pound out a set of worthless multiple choice quizzes as per above, and then go jack off to bestiality porn for two months until it’s time to administer the final. Rinse and repeat next semester. If any teachers are working overtime this year, it’s only due to their technological illiteracy and incompetence at distance teaching. They failed their students.
I know this, because I see the students every week. I see them get depressed, lose confidence in themselves, grow desperate for interactions with the outside world while simultaneously loathing the computer. Most of the ones I talk to are failing, granted, due to the nature of my job. But most students across the country are failing, so I consider them to be indicative. Most of the time a single hour of instruction a week is enough to take them from failing to Bs and As. Apparently that one hour of face to face instruction would just be the straw on the camel’s back for teachers, however, many of whom don’t even record lectures, let alone interact with the students directly over video call. The children failing right now are more than capable of grasping the subject matter — the collapse in grades this past year is entirely due to a failure to teach.
As much as I would love to blame it all on teachers, they’re only one piece of the giant child-destroying mechanism America has built for itself. Administrators, local politicians, federal politicians, doctors, researchers, lobbyists and boomers have all offered their support to this inhumane way of life. School administrators have failed to adapt to the pandemic and are ignoring both students’ and parents’ calls for help. Politicians have shut down schools with a poor understanding of the science of pandemics, and have left it entirely up to the inadequate administrators to resolve the resulting crisis. Doctors and researchers have contributed misleading guidelines about school closures, delayed vital information for months due to bureaucratic hangups, and even been straight up wrong about extremely basic, obvious facts, which any researcher in East Asia (or anyone with an internet connection) could have corrected them on. Lobbyists for Pfizer and Moderna and J&J and who knows who else have exerted all their influence on government to prevent the use of pre-existing drugs to reduce severity of the disease, to prevent research teams from being established to explore any possibility other than sit around and wait for them to synthesize a vaccine so they can collect their multi-billion dollar payouts. An entire establishment’s worth of incompetence, greed and malice is nothing new, but the lynchpin of this particular opportunity for senseless oppression is the boomers.
Ah, the boomers. The Most Narcissistic Generation In The History Of The World. It’s hard to overstate how much I loathe these crusty sacks of fear and petulance. I have known good boomers, of course, the same as some murderers reform in prison and go on to do acts of community service and lecture circuits about the dangers of drugs. The vast majority of them are childishly irresponsible, yet grandiose and full of their own importance — they genuinely believe Woodstock was a cultural event, for instance, and not just an opportunity for rapists and pushers to ply their crafts. Every good thing that happened in America for the past 50 years, boomers have claimed credit for, and every bad thing they have disavowed all responsibility for. So it should be no surprise that people this self-absorbed, this fragile, this megalomaniacal would be weaponized by Pfizer et al in the war against children. It does make for a stark contrast, though.
Boomers fear the germ. They worry they might die a few years earlier than otherwise, miss out on a couple years of draining social security and making bleating sounds about millennials and smart phones. It’s easy to work the boomers into a frothing paranoia, they hardly needed any convincing. This ridiculous lockdown, stringent far beyond the requirements of any reasonable pandemic response, yet not nearly strict enough to actually halt the spread of the ‘vid entirely, is thanks to the boomers’ firm belief that without it they would begin collapsing in the aisles of Walmart, dying in their mobile homes, or being forced into the indignity of another trip to the hospital on their children’s dime. The boomers are incapable of learning for themselves, which makes them an ideal target for propagandizing. If they hear it on the cable news, they will believe it. They sincerely believe their lives are at stake.
To save themselves, they are willing to ruin another generation. They hold up Gen Z (and Alpha, too) like a body shield against a bullet. In order to preserve the opportunity to drag their decrepit bodies around Disneyworld one last time, boomers will cut an entire generation off at the knees. They will punish every schoolchild in America. They will gladly see a sharp elbow punched into every child’s graph of potential, a firm inflection toward the negative slope in their lifelong QoL, just out of fear of getting a virus that we know now can be treated anyway. Take every anecdote you’ve ever heard about boomers emotionally abusing their kids or grandkids, every person you know who has had their lives destabilized by an immature elder, and blow that up to an institutional level. There really is no way to mince words about it — boomers are inflicting damage on every child in America all at once, thanks to their egos. For a handful of them to live another five years themselves, they will steal a year from every kid in the country, and leave a mark on them that will last for fifty. The many sacrificed for the sake of the few.
Forget, for a moment, that corporate propaganda has prevented the news of generic drugs reducing infection severity, or the fact that politicians have seized on shutdowns as a means of economic control, or any other systemic type thinking. If the boomers had not been such pompous jackals, simultaneously arrogant beyond reason and myopic beyond belief, they would not have been susceptible to this kind of propaganda in the first place. If they had the slightest consideration for children as human beings, they would not have so readily lent credence to the policy of total lockdown, or at least would not have allowed it to go on unnoticed. They knew what they were doing, it’s not like the results of this shutdown have been hidden or surprising. There’s no excuse not to know how devastated children are. Depression, suicide and overeating among young people are at rates higher than ever before seen, an entire generation of people around and underneath me are being ground into dust, their hope is fading, their levity replaced with numb postwoundedness, and the boomers’ response? “Fuck them kids.”
