They kept schools closed too long!

Every time I hear this, I have a couple of thoughts.

Did they keep ***your*** schools close too long?

I don't know how it worked in other metropolitan areas, but around Illinois, many of the school districts opened as soon as they could assure that kids would be safe. The outlier was Chicago Public Schools, where families were much more cautious and the people who worked in the schools were more skeptical that CPS could keep them clean. (The labor strife that followed was largely about the union saying that a box of wet wipes and masks was not enough to keep the schools safe.)

The point though is that the people in the city had less faith that the schools could keep their families safe from covid and the people in the suburbs were mostly happy with the cautious, but affirmative approach that ***their*** districts were taking in opening to students.

I would bet you though if you grabbed a representative sample of voters and asked them two questions: Did schools stay closed too long? Did your local school district handle opening up appropriately? Majorities would say yes to both.

"They kept schools closed too long!" is the perfect Republican talking point. It takes an issue that is dealt with in good faith by people with less in life, and ports it over to be a complaint by people for whom it did not really affect.

You can say the same about so many of the issues that RFK Jr. and his fans repeat. All of the problems that he loves to use are largely products of the social determinates of health. All of his solutions are aimed at selling bullshit to people who have enough money to already be healthy. It's all just concern trolling over poor people who you don't care about.