No, let’s not forgive and forget the school closers
Timothy P. Carney
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It’s been a constant refrain for at least a year: Don’t hold it against the lockdowners and the school closers that they were wrong.
New York University professor Scott Galloway is the latest to make this plea:
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People make mistakes. We should always forgive people who make mistakes and apologize. And even though it pains an Irishman like me to say it, we shouldn’t hold grudges for too long.
But we should not be ready to move on from what the lockdowners and school closers did to our children and in turn to the rest of the country.
These people didn’t merely harm children with their bad policies.
The lockdowners should have known better, but they let politics influence their decisions. The lockdowners viciously attacked and punished those of us who opposed them and ruined the lives of some. They never acknowledged the significant risk of what they were doing — they idiotically or dishonestly pretended there was little or no risk to keeping children out of school for a year while closing their Little Leagues and libraries. Almost none of them paid a price for the harm they caused.
We knew by July 2020 that there were serious risks to closing schools. That may be an understatement: We knew that refusing to reopen schools in fall 2020 would harm children.
The American Academy of Pediatrics was one of many groups that said as much. Sadly, when former President Donald Trump agreed, the medical establishment reversed itself, and the Democrats began campaigning against reopening schools.
Jennifer Sey was a Levi’s executive who came under such fierce attack for supporting school reopenings that she was drummed from her job.
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Our county’s chief lockdowner, health officer Travis Gayles, attacked the schools and parents who wanted to open as “arrogant.” One local politician, Craig Rice, said that affluence and privilege were the only reasons private school parents wanted to educate their children in person. The teachers unions said all parents wanted was “free babysitters.”
There wasn’t a cost-benefit analysis in which the closers came down on the wrong side. They denied the existence of costs even though those costs were obvious — which is to say they didn’t think about how their favored policies would affect children. That’s going to make it hard to forgive them.