Even the passengers on the Titanic knew better than today’s COVIDiot overlords.
Although the catastrophic crash of the paradoxically named RMS Titanic has come to mark the end of the Gilded Age, the sinking of the ship forced its passengers to abandon the rank classism of the fin de siecle and go back to the basics. While the Titanic spent its four days en route to New York City stratified into the stark class system of the era’s ostentatious ocean liners, crisis forced the very best of Edwardian ethics to override whatever social mores had dominated the days before.
The percentage of third-class children saved (34%) was actually slightly higher than the percentage of first-class men saved (33%). The share of third-class women saved (46%) was more than double that of their male counterparts (22%).
When pressed in a crisis of immediate life and death, more than 2,000 strangers over 100 years ago still had the soul and good sense to prioritize saving women and children first.
Today’s COVID policymakers have chosen precisely the opposite approach.
In most of the country, bars and concerts have remained open and at capacity for two years. All the while, students were locked out of classrooms thanks to absurd quarantine requirements or, worse, outright school closures. And parents, disproportionately mothers, have been forced to sideline their own careers and paychecks to accommodate their children remaining at home.
Despite the vaccines proving wildly successful at protecting those who choose to get them from developing severe illness (crucially not the transmission of the virus itself), the burden has somehow become even more onerous on children and parents than it was from the start.
Thanks to some extraordinary combination of the vaccine rollout and natural immunity, the current COVID death rate in Los Angeles is now a mere fraction of what it was after Gov. Gavin Newsom enacted his disastrous outdoor dining ban right before the 2020 holidays. Yet now, as Angelenos en masse are safer from the virus than they have been throughout the entire pandemic, the school district is forcing students to upgrade from already onerous cloth masks to highly restrictive N95s.
This is egregious not just because it is unnecessary — recall that even with the more severe delta variant, unvaccinated teenagers suffered a lower coronavirus death rate than fully vaccinated 30-year-olds — but specifically because it is actively harmful. Back at the start of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that healthcare workers forced into N95s all day would suffer significant physiological stress, such as headaches, “increased pressure inside the skull,” “reduction in cognition,” and “difficulty coordinating sensory or cognitive, abilities and motor activity.” Maybe this was a worthy trade-off for healthcare professionals treating coronavirus patients prior to the availability of a number of effective vaccines and therapeutics. But now? For children, who even without vaccination are less likely to die from COVID than from drowning?
And ignoring the overwhelming evidence that children remain mercifully protected from severe COVID consequences, cities such as Washington, D.C., currently ban children older than 11 from entering businesses such as restaurants and sports arenas without proof of vaccination despite an indoor mask mandate for all but infants. Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City are all enacting proof-of-vaccine mandates for children older than 4, with zero option to provide a negative coronavirus test instead.
So what if you’re a parent concerned with the fact that the myocarditis risk for males younger than 40 is greater from the Moderna vaccine than from the coronavirus — or that Sweden, hardly a bastion of right-wing anti-vaxxers, has decided against vaccinating children under 12. If you refuse to comply, your children are banned from public life.
And all of this ignores the disproportionate burden on mothers, especially the least privileged. While wealthy parents can afford the childcare to accommodate indefinite school closures such as those in Flint, Michigan, or the random dayslong quarantines in most big-city school districts, the working mothers who need their paychecks the most are forced to stay home with their children.
The result? Immense stress and career setbacks for mothers and a mental health catastrophe for children. And the same childless millennials who bitch and moan incessantly about the need for “self-care” are the ones who justify this child abuse with the lie that children are resilient.
In therapy circles for abuse victims, there is an axiomatic retort to the Nietzchism that what does not kill you makes you stronger. “But I was a child,” the saying goes. “I didn’t need to be strong — I needed to be safe.”
Safety, for children during this pandemic, didn’t mean protecting them from a virus that, for them, was quite literally no more fatal, and perhaps less so, than the seasonal flu. It meant keeping them safe from the trauma of isolation and learning loss, from the developmental delays derived from depriving them of normal socialization and play. The coronavirus generation of children is not safe, and they certainly aren’t strong. They are damaged, and they will rightly want revenge.
The America the Titanic was sailing toward was still years away from giving women the basic right to vote. A fifth of all children younger than 16 was still working for pay, and the labor movement as a whole would still have to wait decades before earning sweeping protection from Congress. And still, the paragons of white male wealth and privilege quite literally sacrificed their own lives to prioritize those of women and children across classes. If only the teachers unions and big blue city mayors of today could be half as woke.
