Why the back-to-school debate is impossible: We are being asked to make yearlong policy in a crisis mode where the week-to-week policy adaptation is not happening.

We need to still be working primarily in terms of the next three weeks, although this short-term action would generate the conditions that make longer term planning possible.

That is, work backwards. If the goal is to have anyone in rooms together within 6 weeks, shelter in place starts now.

What we have instead is the worst of both worlds. We have pressure to try and avert long term devastation without the willingness to do the things that avert devastation.

In first grade my friend and I were playing don’t fall in the lava on the slide, and we suddenly asked, why don’t we ever let ourselves fall in the lava instead? We slid down the slide. We found out. The game ended. This was a good life lesson.

I wrote on here just PRE pandemic that the most relevant fable is the Emperor’s New Clothes. One way I know this is still true is that it feels strange or wrong to state the obvious, like that we are still in a crisis and need to be pushing for crisis-time legislation etc.

That’s why none of these smaller-scale policies can work, because the big stuff didn’t get put in place. they restarted baseball practice. US “reopening” was decorating unbaked cake batter

If figuring out the next year seems impossible, let’s kludge together three weeks and do the things that make things better in three weeks. Reopening early, paradoxically, came from looking too far into the future. It was magical thinking, that time just makes things better.

looking too far ahead like “the economy can’t take this forever” caused much more harm. Paradoxically, short-term planning is what refuses to take the future at face value. It acknowledges crisis mode and makes things possible that aren’t available in “normal times”.

By fighting this false “return to normal” where normal is hell, we are pushing back against the drive to normalize and deny the evidence of our eyes. And this is one of the most important things we can do right now.