A sign of The Times
Labelling parents as antivax over concerns about school conditions is misguided at best, dangerous at worse.
Schools in the UK are set to open this week. But not without huge changes.
The Times on Saturday published an article titled “Schools on a mission to allay fears before Monday’s reopening”.
Over the weekend, I bumped into a friends’ kid, who took a break from his skateboarding to say hello.
“Yeah, we have to get regular tests,” he sighed. He went onto explain that they’ll likely have to stay apart and wear masks for the unforeseeable future. He waved goodbye, and carried on skating, with his pals in a car park. The town council decided to board up the actual skatepark the other week. The police also set up a 24/7, 360 degree high-tech police camera to watch over any dissent and “keep us safe”.
How many kids and parents right now are grappling with the prospect of returning to these strange conditions, entirely unnatural to the human condition?
How many of these children have suffered, and are continuing to do from mental health issues? Based on new research, the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF said on Thursday that more than 330 million youngsters have been stuck at home for at least nine months. Left feeling isolated, afraid, lonely and anxious because of enforced lockdowns. 350 million of them.
So back to the Times article.
In an odd Twitter thread, the Times blames this anxiety on the so-called “antivax” movement. So all of you sitting at home right now, grappling with the emotional rollercoaster of your children going to conditions which resemble a mix of the asylum in 12 Monkeys and THX 1138. You reading this. You’re just a bunch of Andrew Wakefield MMR autism weirdos.
Worried that school children will have to sit at the back of class if caught without a mask, or even that they will have to wear one ALL day? Well, that’s some Pastor Jim Jones level mania there, guys.
“Schools are using every weapon in their armoury to reopen safely by making TikTok style videos and sending teachers on doorstep missions to convince children to have Covid tests and wear masks,” the Times tweeted in a Kool Aid haze.
Notice the words “weapon and armoury” here. To be honest, the Jerusalema Tiktok dance challenge used as a tool to coerce authoritarianism, has been unexpected. I would have thought “Jive Bunny” be more suited to dystopian psychological bullying, but Master KG will do.
In another tweet The Times posted that: “However, parents in Facebook and Telegram groups are swapping tips on how to ensure that children are not tested or required to wear masks”. Now if you look over the Atlantic, a very strange phenomena is happening to journalism over there.
The journalist Glen Greenwald noted the way reporting has shifted towards “tattletale”, US slang for “grassing up”. Greenwald is the journalist who broke the original story about former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealing how the intelligence agency NSA taps tech giants' user data to facilitate mass-scale surveillance
“A new and rapidly growing journalistic “beat” has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance,” he wrote in his Substack article.
His argument is that increasingly journalists in legacy media outlets like the New York Times and CNN are taking the role of policing what people say, write and think in digital spaces.
They “devote the bulk of their “journalism” to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken,” he wrote.
The Times partook in their own “tattletale”, noting that some parents called head teachers “scum” in messaging apps for allowing testing to take place.
So let me get this right. Parents who have been broken, because of a pandemic which the WHO recently says that it has caused more mass trauma than World War II and warned of its lasting consequences, called a headmaster scum, in a private messaging group, because they don’t want their kid to have an invasive nasal swab a couple of times a week? It’s hardly participating in the Boxer Rebellion to call someone scum last time I checked.
In dark rooms around the UK, there are many spheres competing with each other on the return to schools issue. It’s all political. Headteacher unions are battling the government over the phased return to schools, threatening legal action, knowing full well that there is no evidence that schools are a major driver of cases. Biostatistician professor Jon Deeks, of the Institute of Applied Health Research at the University of Birmingham told Schools Week that he fears testing will be a ‘waste of money and effort’.
Parents and teachers are stuck in the middle of all this, with the children, as ever, losing out.
I happen to value journalism. But I bet you anything that if Times continues to accuse and label parents conspiracy theorists over perfectly reasonable anxieties, and police their private messages, what little trust remains will evaporate, and they will run straight into the arms of what you accuse them off. And who can blame them.
