Items

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  2022-01-21

  School Apologizes After Viral Photo Of Teacher Taping Mask To Student's Face Outrages Parents

  This is a news story from Your Tango by Nia Tipton. This is about a middle school in Pennsylvania, where a video of a teacher taping a mask to a student caused outrage. The photo was taken at Pennfield Middle School in Hatfield. The photo went viral and appeared on Sean Hannity's website. The middle school announced that they are going to conduct an investigation over this scandal. Parents also expressed their anger at school board meetings over this. The mother of the student getting his mask taped to his face says that she never intended for the story to go viral. She used the photo to gain support from a Facebook group prior to a school board meeting. She says that other individuals in the group took it upon themselves to spread this story further.
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  2021-03-17

  A Child’s Reflection

  We’ve had my 10 year daughter journal her thoughts during the past year from time to time, and they’ve ranged from mundane (“we made a fort”) to outraged (“Black people are being hurt in this country and not being heard”), so I was curious what her reflection on a year in quarantine would be. Interestingly, her reflection is overall positive. This surprised me a bit, since she is doing online learning through the end of the school year, missed an entire season of competitive gymnastics and has not had a Girl Scout meeting in person in over a year. I’ll admit I’m relieved that her inner thoughts are about Minecraft, playing in our flooded backyard, and continuing to practice gymnastics at home rather than focusing on all that she’s missed. It makes me think that though this year has impacted my kids that to them, their childhood is still pretty normal. Now I just have to break it to her that when she returns to in person instruction next year, she won’t be able to listen to her music during class!
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  2020-10-06

  Fear, Fiction, and Facebook

  (HIST30060) Content warning: suicide mention. As the pandemic has developed over the course of the year and Victoria has progressed through lockdowns, a Facebook friend of mine from high school has taken to discussing COVID-19 extensively. She posts very regularly (on average between 20 and 30 times per day) with commentary on the pandemic, ranging from sanctimonious to outraged, sharing posts from conspiracy groups, pandemic-denying politicians, and other Facebook users that downplay the existence or severity of the virus. The series of unsubstantiated claims and recurrent mentions of ‘breaking news’ from various unnamed rogue health workers results in some of her Facebook friends querying her content and questioning the validity of her sources. When they reply to her posts, her Facebook friends often attempt to share news articles and updates from verified, fact-checked sources, but when this happens she talks past them, avoids the question, engages in a range of logical fallacies, or outright denies the validity of the information with which she’s been presented. In particular, she received significant backlash from her friends when she shared a post about the Australian suicide rate in 2020, crediting an alleged (untrue) increase directly to the lockdowns: one friend responded to say ‘I’m swiftly losing respect for you and the misinformation you keep posting.’ Earlier in the year, her posts gained greater traction among her Facebook friends: people would react to them, comment with information, speculation, or gentle disagreement; by now (November), the engagement her posts receive has dwindled down to the occasional like, but usually nothing more than that. Seeing her posts when I checked Facebook began to remind me of a conversation I’d had with my housemate about the role of fear and a desire for control behind belief in conspiracy theories; namely that these belief systems might bring warped comfort on some level. In situations that are scary, believing in some nameless, faceless ‘them’, or connecting with other people who claim to have secret insider information hidden from the general public, might help ease a feeling of powerlessness by believing someone is in control. I would allege her Facebook posts stem at least in part from fear, which I feel is more than understandable given an underlying experience for many people this year has been a deep, semi-constant sense of paralytic uncertainty. While I empathise with this, and genuinely feel compassion towards her for what she’s going through, I can’t help but think the way she has responded to these feelings is irresponsible at best, and dangerous at worst. I find her advocacy of the importance of independent research and critical thinking approaches irony, as the ‘research’ she describes appears to consist of discussing factually incorrect information with other scared people who are also searching for stability and predictability. I don’t begrudge her the fear she feels in any capacity, nor do I want to pass judgement on how others cope with this experience, but I can’t help feeling that this does more harm than good; I worry it proliferates false information, and further demoralises those who read it. While individual conjecture, ideas, philosophising, and critical thinking are absolutely necessary and a healthy degree of scepticism is vital when reading anything, I believe there is a degree of responsibility one assumes to check, even cursorily, that the content they’re sharing has some basis in fact, especially in instances like this where people are quite literally dying. While the experience of the pandemic is undoubtedly having a severe effect on her, I feel irritated reading her advocacy of things that will objectively place other people at risk of illness. It seems to me insensitive to spread deliberately divisive misinformation, given there are people who are assume risk every day when they go to work (even in a country that has implemented measures to control the spread of the disease, when many countries overseas have not). I worry about the broader social repercussions of the division and polarisation that misinformation contributes to, both in the case of COVID-19 and in other contexts. When I look over the things she’s been posting on Facebook, I feel overwhelming pity and compassion for what she is going through individually, and what everyone in Victoria is undergoing as a collective. I understand that everyone is coping with an extremely stressful and emotionally taxing experience and is attempting to manage as well as they can. I’ve seen parallels drawn between the COVID-19 pandemic and previous pandemic disease outbreaks and major historical events in general, and the comfort people derive from a sense of shared experience during difficulty. I think in part the pandemic has cemented in my mind the confronting fact that being alive is just living through a series of major historical events; that history is not something that has happened to other people, in other places, at other times, but is happening now and will continue to happen, over and over. While this is incredibly confronting to think about and dredges up an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness at times, it seems to me by looking at both the past and the present that people working to mutually support each other make upheaval, fear, and uncertainty much easier to bear.
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  2020-09-30

  Incarcerated Children Are Getting Covid Too

  Months ago the media did report on the outbreak of Covid cases in the nations jails and prisons. Though Covid continues to spread in correctional facilities it seems to have largely fallen off the media's radar and I haven't seen any coverage of the children in correctional facilities who are also sick with Covid. It saddens me to even write this because the phrase "incarcerated children" should not have meaning.
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  2020-04-06

  COVID 19 Journal: 04/06/2020

  COVID 19 Journal by Kaitlin Whalen written 04/06/2020
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  2020-04-16

  Ohio Stay at Home Protesters or the Purge? Photo by Joshua Bickel

  Many images from this pandemic are haunting: empty grocery store aisles, deserted national monuments, shuttered restaurants. But this image captured by Joshua Bickel takes the cake. Positioned from inside the Ohio Statehouse, Bickel snaps outraged protestors, chanting various cries against the governor and the Stay-at-Home orders that blanket the state. The people sport banal nationalistic tokens such as Trump hats and American flags, but no face-masks, an article that has come to epitomize civic and public duty in the weeks past. This image shows how not only has the pandemic spread across the nation, but so have doubts and nudges against authority from higher ups in the American government. Protests of this nature have not cropped up in other parts of the world nearly to the extent that they have swept the great USofA. Some point our anomalous trends to lack of leadership in Washington and lack of national unity in the midst of what can only be called a public health/economic/social crisis. Benedict Anderson's "imagined community" that pulls a nation together is simply falling apart as we cannot come together and unite under facts, science, and leadership at a time when we need it most. Bickel's image portrays an America that is not filled with communion and fraternity, but riddled with "hoaxes" and ignorance. Of course we are all wanting to return to our normal lives, but to go out and protest and participate in an activity that inherently prolongs our quarantine? Seems pretty un-American to me.