Kids, Covid, and Culture Wars
Simply Devotion [Podcast Introduction]
November 24, 2020
What Does the Bible Say About Spiritualism?
December 1, 2020
Kids, COVID, and Culture Wars.
By Vinnie MacIsaac
[November 29th, 2020]
Write This and Why Read This.
Normally I don’t date my blogs and people generally read or re-read them in whatever timeframe blesses them the most. Yet, when it comes to writing about COVID and 2020, I have come to feel that dates are needed because things are changing so fast. What is a “fact” as I write this blog may be proven or disproven by the time you read this. I am not a definitive authority of any kind but I am a well-read, concerned person of faith. So why write this if facts are still being found? COVID-19 is a novel virus, that means new and that we are still learning about it. Despite it being new and that our understanding of it is ever-evolving, that is not stopping it from affecting our children now. And since it is affecting children now, now is the time to start the conversation. This article is not about definitive solutions but is about heightening awareness and starting the conversation. I am writing now this because children are in danger and, from what I can see, America is so caught in the COVID Culture War that we are grossly ignoring the welfare of our children. I pray that I am wrong, but from what I can see, no matter when the pandemic ends it will not end its long-term impact on our children. It will affect them the rest of their childhood if not their entire lives.
What Is the COVID Culture War?
To wear a mask or not wear a mask to Costco is not the question. The question that is buried behind that question is what matters: is the pandemic real or is it some deep evil “Plandemic” cast upon us all by the globalist in some vast power grab? Did China start it on purpose to mess up the US economy and maybe even throw the election? Did the Democrats co-op it, promote it, and make a big deal about it to win the election? These are culture war questions, and as bizarre as it sounds, with 11.6 million confirmed COVID cases and 250K deaths due to COVID[i] in the US alone, people still are asking such questions. Likely even many of my readers, maybe even you, struggle with such ideas. We can’t seem to separate cultural assumptions[ii] and fears from facts. Call it fear, call it lack of governmental trust, call it toxic hyper-partisan politics on both sides of the political divide, but whatever you do, call it like it is: a COVID culture war being fueled by conspiracy theory and being high-jacked to keep Americans divided in one of our greatest struggles since WW2.
Then there is what I call the second stage culture war which goes like this; “We can’t live in fear.” “We have to get back to normal no matter who dies.” “The cure can’t be worse than the disease.” “What good is life if we can’t live it.” “They are stealing our liberty.” “This is a stage one test to see how easy you become the “Sheeple[iii]” and wear their mask.” “If you take the vaccine, they will embed a chip in you.”
All wars take two sides to fight, so those who favor intervention, scientific data, mask-wearing mandates, and local or widespread shutdowns, have not always been blameless either. They too often have ignored the mass unemployment rates, the economic ruin of whole families, parents’ inability to work and have a safe place for their children, and the very real emotional and psychological effects of the pandemic on people and their health. It is almost, for this side of the war, to even acknowledge these real problems is in some way to suggest that COVID deniers and restriction rebels are right and we have to stop all intervention and succumb to herd immunity. However, acknowledging, addressing, and even making concessions on the fluidity of approaches to a novel pandemic is not denying science; it is following all the science, including the implications of social science and long-term impact even when the pandemic ends.
The tragedy that is played out every night on our cable news is that both sides simply scream at the other and are wholeheartedly convinced that if the other side just did as they demand, this could magically make all the problems go away. COVID and this pandemic are not magically going away, vaccine or no vaccine, mask or no mask, because its lasting impacts on our social, political, family and religious systems could take decades to repair, even if we eliminated the virus today. But does either side seem to get that? If so, which network is that on?
How Does the Culture War Affect Children?
Even before this pandemic, life for way too many children in America was no “happy shiny place,” with approximately 700,000 new individual reports of child abuse each year, and 3.5 million kids needing interventions[iv] for serious neglect, and both physical and sexual abuse, too often compounded. In 2019, before the onset of the pandemic, there were 672,000 children in foster care in the US and no less than 424,000 on any given day of the year[v]. One-third of them were people of color and the average age was 8. Over 100,000 of these children were available for adoption[vi], meaning someplace along the line a court or judge permanently severed their legal belonging to a family out of the best interest of the child; which is an extreme action for a court to take. However, in part due to factors like out of country adoptions[vii] and mother placed volunteer infant adoptions, less then 26% of adoptions by Americans came from this 100,000 number of America’s most vulnerable, invisible, and forgotten children[viii]. America is not a third world nation, but it is a nation that even before the pandemic took low stock in protecting its own children. In fact, it alarmingly ranked 36th internationally, just above Russia and Kuwait and additionally among the lowest for developed Western countries for child safety[ix] while by far ranking the absolute wealthiest nation on the globe[x]. We have the money to protect our children, what we lack, even in the best of times, is the heart and compassion to invest it in turning America’s most vulnerable into America’s most valuable resources. So how does this play out in the COVID Culture War? Children have been devalued yet again; this time they are the pawns rather than concerns. It goes like this:
Person One:
“We need to get these kids back to school, we are destroying their lives!”
Person Two:
“You want to infect these poor kids with a deadly virus?”
Person One:
“No kid ever dies from this, it is a hoax.”
Person two:
“Yes, they do! (cites rare but real examples); you care more about proving this a hoax than the children!”
Please notice, neither person really shows any empathy for the sexually abused, grossly neglected, parentless children out there who now suddenly have COVID and quarantine to contend with on top of everything else. Their care about the welfare of children stops at winning the culture war argument. For crying out loud, get your head out of your need to feed your ego and win your political points; there are beaten, broken, and forgotten children out there who not only are losing the will to go on, but on top of all of that are now being infected with COVID-19 at rising rates! America, God Help Us! What is wrong with us?
What Do We Know About Dangers to Children?
Originally as the pandemic broke, little thought was given to children past the question would the school year-end early? Thinking back to February and March (2020) may be hard for many of us because so much has happened, changed, and then changed yet again this year, that the start of the pandemic seems so long ago. But even the most pessimistic among us (myself included) expected at worst “more hype than spread” and at most, a very short shutdown, and it would pass shortly, and scare us, but return us to normal with a minor footnote in history. We were all wrong because we can guess, and we can follow science, but this is a novel virus, and we don’t always get it right. We were, for some reason, so focused at the start on if it was real and how fast it would spread, that we overlooked children because they seemed to recover quicker and with less hospitalizations and acute illness. Many assumed and acted like children scored a free pass with the virus. In fact, we all pretty much assumed it was a disease of the elderly and we focused all our efforts on protecting people over 60. Even as more children contracted COVID-19 and even some died, little was mentioned in the media or national dialogue which further entrenched the idea that children don’t get COVID and that they certainly don’t die of it.
Who were the children who died of COVID-19 in America? Children of color, Hispanic, Black, and Native Americans[xi] so the fact that many Americans still don’t believe children can die of COVID-19 is just one more brick in the systematic racist denial wall of the COVID Culture Wars.
“Of the children who died, 78% were children of color: 45% were Hispanic, 29% were Black and 4% were non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native.”[xii]
“The data is horrifying, but not surprising to me,” Dr. Uché Blackstock, founder of Advancing Health Equity, told Insider. “Where you see marginalization and disadvantage, you’re going to find coronavirus.”[xiii]
The fact that hundreds[xiv], as opposed to thousands, of children are dying of COVID-19 is not an excuse to ignore it. Which parent wants to offer up their child to the gamble even with low odds of preventable child deaths? Are you willing to sacrifice your child so mine can go to school, church, and clubs? The fact that these deaths are overwhelmingly among the marginalized minorities makes that lack of attention to these children inexcusable but especially and tragically in a year that has been all about racial injustice and social change!
Now we know that COVID-19 is on the rise among children and that they in fact make up a serious percentage of infections. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, one in every eleven cases of COVID are children[xv]. This is a steadily increasing number, up 22% since the pandemic first started. With the general overall apathy about children and COVID and the “Fall Spike” well underway at such rapid and increasing rates, this very likely could result in more childhood deaths. And even if more deaths are not forthcoming (and we pray they are not) studies show that systemic inflammation in recovered children remains a very serious problem that will lead to long-term health damage[xvi]. It is extremely alarming that medical and psychology journals alike are warning that residual inflammation and other factors among COVID survivors are causing a concerning sky-rocketing rise in clinical mental illness[xvii] and at rates doubling the normal population rates[xviii] within a three-month window of recovery[xix]. There seems to be a very real link between recovered COVID infections and a rapid immediate decline in both mental functioning and physical health. COVID recoverees often call this “COVID brain fog[xx]” but we are now coming to understand it is clinical level decline and mental illness[xxi]. When we consider the long-term effect on children – not only those who we know had it, but also those who may have caught it and recovered undetected, since they tended to be much less symptomatic – the lifelong impact could be devastating and overwhelm our long term infrastructure.
Speaking of the pandemic and children’s mental illness, what effect has the lockdown had on them? What additional stresses has it put on families and already at-risk youth? Lockdowns and shelter in place orders may protect children and adults from the virus, but they certainly are not good for vulnerable children, and repeated child victims who normally would have oversight by built-in mandatory reporters[xxii] [xxiii] like teachers, social workers, and DSS workers. Reports of abuse have actually gone down in the US over the pandemic – which is actually a very bad sign because certainly under this stress abuse is not happening less, it is more likely that it is being reported less[xxiv].
Karen Dineen Wagner, MD, Ph.D. professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Texas Medical Branch, recently concluded after looking at research that globally surveyed the psychological impact of the isolation of the pandemic on children, “Overall, the research demonstrates that COVID-19 is affecting the mental health of children and adolescents and that depression and anxiety are prevalent”[xxv] and here in America mental health advocates grow more and more worried as the pandemic roars on about the long term damage of isolation, depression, anxiety, and despair in children[xxvi]. Experts are warning America could soon be on the verge of a teen suicide epidemic[xxvii] unless we find ways to address these problems and the damage already done.
Lastly, since neglect is one of the major forms of abuse our children contend with, lack of daycare, lack of open schools, lack of someone insuring they get food, coupled with the reality of low paying essential worker jobs that can’t be done from home (like store clerks, healthcare aides, fast food workers, and delivery workers, etc.) both parents and children are facing an uphill battle for day to day survival. Parents and children are beyond exhausted.
What Should We Be Doing?
I don’t care if you are “Team Blue State,” or “Team Red State,” or pro-life, pro-choice, or pro-science or pro-small government, knock off your token “if they would only listen to my side it will all be ok” stance! No! No! No! You don’t have the answers, so stop pretending you do and digging us deeper into a divided culture war that is damaging our children! If you want to be a partisan hack, and make the pandemic political, that is on your own head, but stop yoking it around the necks of helpless children, because I can tell you right now in “the Judgement,” Jesus is going to be quoting to you Matthew 18:6[xxviii] and if that is going to be a problem for you, I suggest you take it up with Him now.
This is a highly complex problem that has no quick-fix answers. Even if we could wave a magic wand and make COVID-19 disappear from the planet, the residual effects will stay with today’s children forever. If it is chronic inflammatory disorder in “cured children”, a COVID-19 death of one or both parents, long term mental illness caused either by the disease or the social impacts of lockdowns, or one of a host of abuses, that somehow still happen in America even when there is mandatory oversight, that got even worse in the pandemic; we need to stop the blame game and get on with healing our children who have been damaged.
It is not as easy as “Make them wear a mask,” “Get them back to normal,” “Take the vaccine,” “Stop the lock-down,” or “Open the schools.” Don’t you get it yet? Heaven help us, we are way past any of those options changing much of anything that our children are going to face. The pandemic will end, one way or another. Do we have a year left in this? Two years, or just several months? I have no idea and nor do you. What I do know is that it will be a “heck” of a mess to clean up and will demand all our resources. If America was doing so poorly protecting their most vulnerable while being the wealthiest nation in the world in good times, how much care will our children get when we are tapped out for the next decade cleaning up the fallout?
In an article I wrote at the beginning of the pandemic, I compared the start of the pandemic with this generation’s 9/11. I noted that it is universally agreed by social researchers that 9/11 forever impacted and damaged the generational development of Millennials. At the time I thought that maybe I was too bold with the suggestion the pandemic was on that scale of impact. I now know I was too tame. The pandemic is like 9/11 and the exploding buildings happened, not just in NYC and at the Pentagon, but rather directly in every city, town, and village, and household, in the entire world, all at once. Unlike 9/11 no firemen, no emergency crews, and no police came to pull our kids out. They wanted to, they tried, they ran towards the explosions; we had frontline workers like doctors, nurses, researchers, health department experts, and essential workers [xxix] but the culture war got in the way, blocked the roads, slowed everyone down, and made rescues take much longer than needed. Meanwhile, infections and impact on children continue to spread and cause long term problems.
I don’t have answers. I am not naïve enough to really believe any answers are self-evident. The problem is actually not the lack of answers anyway. The problem is tokenism, confirmation bias, culture war assumption answers on both sides of the divide. What I do leave you with, in closing, are seven points of non-partisan, non-culture war, discussion ideas. Maybe just maybe they can help us get past the great divide and at least dialogue together. You don’t need to agree with me but you do need to, for the love of our children, think with me.
We need more counselors, social workers, and court-appointed advocates who can provide virtual and in-person services to children now. They need to be in the first-tier group of people (along with medical professionals) who get vaccinated. We need to, for over the next 10 years at least, double the mental health experts that directly work with children.
We need rapid testing and contact tracing in place as we phase children back into schools and other Institutions until everyone received the vaccine and it is proven fully effective.
We need to return to school and other Institutions not in droves, after the fall spike, but in phases, and not based on desire but need (special needs, learning disabilities, emotional and mental health, parents’ employment, etc.)
We as parents need to do better in setting up safe social distancing and COVID-19 points of interactions for our children’s social lives (social disitancing play dates, outside hangouts, virtual social parties, etc.) during the transition out of the pandemic.
We need to seriously study and make long-term adjustments in the educational curriculum for children because their education has been interrupted in unfair ways that could not be compensated by the alternatives we served them. We need to be honest in admitting that some populations have been greatly underserved and educationally disadvantaged and a damaging inequality will exist post-pandemic that must be addressed.
We need to set up pediatric research grants that focus on studying the long-term physical, emotional, mental, and social impacts of COVID-19 and make treatment recommendations. Parent/child national helplines and resource centers need to be set up federally as soon as possible to provide medical, educational, and psychological help for years to come.
We need to humbly ask our children to forgive us and pray that not only they do, but God does too.
Last Thought:
We may want to forget this all as fast as we can but our children certainly will not. As they grow and understand more what happened and why they also will remember how people of faith responded or did not respond. Remember this; they will judge the value of our faith on it.
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footnotes:
[i] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_casesper100klast7days
[ii] Political Partisanism is cultural
[iii] Sheeple means to take on a docile outlook that sheep have for their shepherd. The term has been used as slang by ultra-conservatism as a slur against those who trust governing authorities or conventional wisdom. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sheeple#:~:text=informal,for%20obeying%20authority%20like%20livestock.%E2%80%94
[iv] https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/national-statistics-on-child-abuse/#:~:text=Nearly%20700%2C000%20children%20are%20abused,kids%20in%20a%20given%20year.
[v] https://www.childrensrights.org/newsroom/fact-sheets/foster-care/#:~:text=On%20any%20given%20day%2C%20there,for%20five%20or%20more%20years.
[vi] https://www.adoptuskids.org/meet-the-children/children-in-foster-care/about-the-children#:~:text=How%20many%20children%20are%20awaiting,are%20waiting%20to%20be%20adopted.
[vii] This is often, but not always, done to insure the race and gender of a baby. Sometimes it happens due to concern for children in other parts of the world, employment placement, or another connection.
[viii] https://archive.pov.org/offandrunning/fact-sheet/#:~:text=About%20135%2C000%20children%20are%20adopted,are%20voluntarily%20relinquished%20American%20babies.
[ix] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2018-05-30/report-the-best-and-worst-countries-for-childhood-safety#:~:text=The%20best%20country%20for%20children,lowest%20for%20developed%20Western%20countries.
[x] https://howmuch.net/articles/distribution-worlds-wealth-2019
[xi] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/16/913365560/the-majority-of-children-who-die-from-covid-19-are-children-of-color
[xii] Reported by the CDC and mentioned on NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/09/16/913365560/the-majority-of-children-who-die-from-covid-19-are-children-of-color
[xiii] https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-black-and-brown-children-dying-from-the-coronavirus-2020-9
[xiv] Globally. In the USA we likely are still under 200 child deaths as of this writing.
[xv] https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/?fbclid=IwAR2cmjo_VOuNI63xX_G8QOY4X7KM4A62EUGNO6fLm2z7Dnu9_C_JTWaCqpE
[xvi] https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/?fbclid=IwAR2cmjo_VOuNI63xX_G8QOY4X7KM4A62EUGNO6fLm2z7Dnu9_C_JTWaCqpE
[xvii] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(20)30462-4/fulltext
[xviii] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/202011/covid-19-doubles-the-risk-new-psychiatric-illness
[xix] https://www.cbs58.com/news/people-who-have-had-covid-19-are-more-likely-to-develop-mental-illness-within-3-months
[xx] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/health/covid-survivors.html
[xxi] https://elemental.medium.com/the-latest-scientific-theories-around-covid-19-brain-fog-6a7c76d7a060
[xxii]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7472978/#:~:text=Although%20rates%20of%20reported%20child,prior%20to%20the%20pandemic%20and
[xxiii] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-child-abuse.html
[xxiv] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/has-child-abuse-surged-under-covid-19-despite-alarming-stories-n1234713
[xxv] https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/new-findings-children-mental-health-covid-19
[xxvi] https://time.com/5870478/children-mental-health-coronavirus/
[xxvii] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911117577/the-pandemic-has-researchers-worried-about-teen-suicide
[xxviii] “If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
[xxix] Thank you nurses, doctors, and all essential workers!
