Putting Down the Fork

 

Plopping the slime on her sister’s face finally ended the game. Rightfully confused, my oldest demanded answers while Annaka giggled out of the bedroom. 

About an hour before, I had half-listened as she tried to explain to me what she wanted to create. A “spinning game,” as she described it, with ways to wake up her siblings. My impulse was to tell her to go watch TV while I finished the dishes; to feed her, again, the half-truth that often becomes the lie: we’ll do it later.

            It was now August, after all, the hardest month for students, parents and teachers. Since all three groups were living in our house, we hardly had time for diversions, especially this time around. But something told me to put down the fork and listen. Aware that she now had my full attention, Annaka quickly began to rattle off the details.

We needed to make a spinning circle, so I found some cardboard. We used a coffee can to trace and snipped it out. We made another circle on printer paper and glued the two together. We divided the circle into six pieces of pie; I divided, she colored them a rainbow. Now we needed pictures of ways to wake up a sibling.

She made her thinking face.

Tooting a horn. Putting on lipstick. Tickling with a feather, a cold washcloth, and an ice cube down the shirt. 

And, finally, the slime.

I’m no artist, but I did my best. We crafted a workable spinner out of a paperclip and low expectations. We took turns spinning, but she always played the trick.

While the slime finished off her sister, it was the ice cube that got her brother out of bed.

With everyone awake, she found someone new to play with, and I returned to the kitchen.

I found the fork waiting.

 

Like millions of parents, my wife and I are trying to wrap our minds around the upcoming school year. Like millions of teachers, we’re climbing up the high dive but haven’t touched the pool. Despite all the bickering and the tossing around of theories, no one really knows what’s going to happen this fall, but one thing is certain: the classrooms we left in March are gone.

            Initially our local area seemed fairly isolated from the COVID surges taking place elsewhere. With more testing, however, and with the lockdown protocols no longer in place, what once seemed unlikely (or inevitable, depending on your point of view) has finally happened: our own numbers are now surging. As of the writing of this column, our positivity rate is close to ten percent, and in the world of communicable diseases, that’s bad. That means that ten percent of our tests are coming back positive, which is enough for the virus to move quickly and begin to put strain on local hospitals.

            Now, despite the importance of this election season, this virus doesn’t care who you plan on voting for in November. Statistically speaking, if you’re young and healthy, COVID will make you feel sick for a week or so and then let you go about your life. If you’re not those two things, the virus might treat you with a little more contempt. It is absolutely worth noting that most people who get this have recovered, but it’s also worth noting that some people have not.

            Regardless, and very much to everyone’s detriment, COVID-19 was politicized from the very beginning. Instead of listening to reason and finding a way to combat the virus in a bipartisan manner, our elected leaders took advantage of the crisis to either double-down on their goal to remove President Trump from office or rally the base in their own re-election stunts.

Instead of listening to actual experts who tried to put the virus in context, the media took advantage of the hysteria to increase clicks and take their own political jabs, which is the unfortunate result of trying to maintain an ideologically-driven, 24-hour news cycle.

            The President, relying on a strong economy to secure his own political fortunes, downplayed the virus early on and to this day seems reluctant to listen to the very people he’s hired to slow the virus’s spread.

            In other words, we are where we are today because too many have refused to listen to information that makes them uncomfortable and might require them to “put down their forks” and do something different.

            So, here is a thought as we begin a new school year. If we refuse to listen to people, who are, admittedly, fickle and biased and sometimes think it’s funny to plop slime on each other’s faces, can we listen to numbers?

            At the beginning of July, according to the Effingham County Health Department, our county had thirteen positive cases of COVID-19. That number had nearly tripled by the middle of the month. At the end of July, we had 104 positive cases, and as of yesterday, August 10^th, our number stood at 191. However, despite this trend, many are still reluctant to consider the most basic of mitigation strategies, such as masking up while indoors.

One might suggest that this increase is entirely due to more testing, and that’s why the positivity rate is such an important data point to keep in mind. With nearly ten percent of our tests coming back positive, we need to listen to the numbers and adjust what we’re doing.

With thousands of people returning to school in less than two weeks, we cannot listen later.