Dying to Graduate

Like everybody else, the pandemic is "top of mind" 24 x 7 for me. I'm writing to help myself not internalize all of it. You can find other posts in the series at https://odonnellweb.com/pelican/tag/coronavirus.html

There is a religious school here in the Richmond area that announced today they are taking advantage of the Phase 1 rules for religious institutions to hold a full 8th grade graduation ceremony next week.

NOBODY GRADUATES FROM 8TH GRADE. It’s a fake graduation. It’s just as fake as kindergarten graduation. Finishing an intermediate grade was not a milestone worthy of a celebration in the before times. Finishing 8th grade is the bare minimum expected of you on the path to adulthood. It certainly isn’t an excuse to gather several hundred people in the same room during a fracking pandemic. We just did a whole TV special that even the racist nut jobs at Fox broadcasted to celebrate the couple of million kids who finished high school and didn’t get graduation, prom, senior skip day, and all the other accouterments of the last semester in high school, yet this group of privileged white folks (and yes, it’s 95% white folks) thinks their special snowflakes “graduation” is literally worth dying for.

Seriously, what is wrong with people? Religious gatherings are one of the very serious vectors for transmission of Covid-19. 35 of the 92 people (38%) who attended services at a rural Arkansas church March 6–11 tested positive for the coronavirus, ultimately killing three of them. Via contact tracing another 22 infected people were identified. That’s 57 infections and 3 dead from one small church in BFE Arkansas. Imagine the death and destruction that would have been the result if white Christians with guns had gotten their way sooner and all churches had remained open all through the first two months of the pandemic?

Also, sci-fi author John Scalzi saves me the trouble of writing this myself, which is a good thing because I would never write it so well.

Sooooo, yeeeeeah. My plan is to stay home for most of June and let other people run around and see how that works out for them. The best-case scenario is that I’m being overly paranoid for an extra month, in which case we can all laugh about it afterward. The worst case scenario, of course, is death and pain and a lot of people confused about why ventilator tubes are stuck down their throats, or the throats of their loved ones, when they were assured this was all a liberal hoax, and then all of us back in our houses until September. Once again, I would be delighted to be proved overly paranoid.

But I will be damn pissed if all the campgrounds close again right after I get my camping trailer.

Image by fredy martinez enamorado from Pixabay