Political Theatre category archive

The superintendent of schools of a Georgia county is less than impressed by his state’s response to COVID-19 as regards schooling. His comments, methinks, could more generally. Here’s a bit of his piece (emphasis added):

We are using kids as virus bait, and that is heinous. We have reluctant leaders who want “others” to make these decisions, so they are not held responsible, especially since it concerns human life. They dance around the subject and hope it either goes away or at least they can say it was a “local” decision.

(snip)

Don’t suddenly tell me, as educators, we have now become “essential workers” just to get us back to work. What were teachers before now, unessential?

In a similar vein, Portland, Maine, Press-Herald contributor Victoria Hugo-Vidal is not impressed:

We sent my sister back to the University of Maine Orono last week. I’ve never played Russian roulette before, but I think this must be what it feels like. It feels like we’re just waiting for COVID-19 to start circulating and to start killing.

Methinks many decisions about reopening and about COVID-19 are based on magickal mystical thinking alloyed with political and moral cowardice. Politicians, in a mirror echo of Captain Picard, keep saying, “Make it not so.”

But it is so. And will continue to be so for some time. And the virus will feed on their cowardice and denial of science and fact.

My town seems to be acting responsibly.

Many seem to forget–or ignore–that one of the phrases in the preamble to the United States Constitution is “to promote the general welfare.”

At the Idaho State Journal, Leonard Hitchcock points this out in the context of a failure to do just that. A snippet (emphasis added):

The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, in an NPR interview, said: “I think it’s a good time for us to go back and reevaluate the purposes of our Constitution, the personal responsibility we each have to make decisions for our own lives,” which is why, she argued, she allowed the Sturgis motorcycle rally to occur.

The willful stupidity of those remarks is astonishing. It’s true that we, as citizens of a democracy, enjoy a wide range of personal freedoms, some of which are spelled out in our Constitution. It’s also self-evident that exercising those freedoms entails personal decision-making and that we can do what we want as long as we are not harming (or are at high risk of harming) someone else.

At the Hartford Courant, Thomas Cangelosi suggests a metaphor for the United States’s incompetent and uncoordinated response to COVID-19. A snippet:

During a recent power outage in Connecticut, I stopped my car at a busy intersection where the traffic signals were blacked out. While I was relieved to see the majority of drivers following the safety protocol of a four-way stop, each taking their turn, I was disturbed by a number of drivers that saw the situation as a license to blow through the intersection.

(snip)

The scene seemed to be a microcosm of the national crossroads America faces as it negotiates the COVID-19 pandemic, which has become nothing less than a crucible of our national character.

Follow the link for his explanation.