We recevied an email yesterday from our daughter’s school. We’ve received an email every day from our daughter’s school. Each email has revealed new positive cases amongst the student body. Sometimes it’s three or four cases. Sometimes it has been as many as seven cases. These are all new cases. Last year, we got maybe one of those emails a week. When we got them there were usually only one or two positive cases.

Now, if we were to act like a scientist (crazy thought I know) we would make a mental note of all of the differences between this year and last. The first major difference is that virtually all of the students have returned to school. Last year was really a 50/50 proposition. My child’s district offers a stay home option, but they cease to be students at their neighborhood school. That means they can’t participate in any extracurricular activities at that school. So, that’s a non-starter for nearly 99 percent of the families around these parts.

The second major difference is that extra curricular activities were severely curtailed last year. Sports schedules were drastically reduced. There were virtually no clubs or organizations. Field trips dropped to zero. There were no pep rallies or other events that schools of all levels often take for granted. Even schools like mine that have few of those things canceled stuff like our Fall Festival.

The third and last major difference was a universal mask mandate. Now, a few large districts are requiring it, but otherwise it has become optional. I still see a majority of students and teachers wear masks, but there is obviously enough of a percentage that don’t to where we notice a difference. Of course, I could be getting ahead of myself here. Technically, any of those three differences (or all of them) could be the reason why we saw fewer cases last school year.

This begs a very simple and straightforward question. How many additional positives are acceptable? How many additional hospitalizations are acceptable? How many additional deaths are acceptable? We have some smart readers around here (a lot smarter than me) but if anyone new stumbles in, it might be good to talk about the difference between natural freedom and political freedom.

We aren’t covering new ground here. Yet, it hit me hard last night as I watched our daughter play volleyball. We watched dozens of students for the other school have a blast as the girls played a long and tough match. The school required everyone to wear masks. A few broke the rules, but most complied. It didn’t seem to curtail their fun at all and both sides gave fist bumps to each other as the girls walked to their bus. They all had fun.

To put this as simply as I can, we know what the human costs are of having half of the students at home. We know the lack of human interaction causes damage to the psyche and we saw its effects academically. We see the tangible and intangible effects of skipping out on those activities that we all used to take for granted. We saw it in reverse last night when we saw how much fun everyone was having.

Masks don’t enter into that equation. Kids can go on field trips and wear masks. Kids can go to football and volleyball games and wear masks. Kids can go to pep rallies and wear masks. Kids can go to homecoming and wear masks. Kids can all go to class and wear masks. Obviously, it’s too early to tell whether masks, social distancing, or curtailing activities was the most responsible for limiting cases. We do know that there are more cases. So, we return to our basic question. How many additional cases are acceptable? More importantly, if we don’t want kids to miss out on those experiences and we still want those numbers to stay low, can’t we just try requiring everyone to mask up?

A concerned parent from Bethany Elementary School in Plano ISD in Plano, Texas forwarded me the PTA newsletter that went out to parents today, as the school grapples with numerous outbreaks of COVID-19. Anna Hulse, the PTA President at Bethany Elementary gathered the following information that proves the impossible circumstances faced by parents, like me, who feel we have no safe education options for our children in Texas public schools.

Chris Hill, the Collin County Judge, is full-on trolling the parents in Collin County with Facebook posts asking parents “WTF is wrong with you?” and “Freedom is more important than education,” when parents challenge him and his interpretation of the law. Well, that freedom has consequences. As of today, 14,000 public school students have tested positive in the state. 15% of all Texans with COVID last week were public school students and staff.

Willam Joy is a reporter for DFW News station WFAA Channel 8

The following Newsletter outlines exactly how few options Texas parents have:

Y’all, Texas politicians are playing politics with our children’s lives in a way that I’ve really never seen in my lifetime. I’ve contacted so many officials and everyone keeps passing the buck all the way up to Governor Abbott, who won’t make any changes no matter how many Texas students fall ill, in order to have a better chance in the next primary against Allen West and Don Huffines.

Four days after the start of the school year, I did something that I never imagined I would do: I unenrolled my 5th grader from public school.  As an avid supporter of and true believer in public schools, this is a decision I never thought I’d make.

I’m a reasonable parent. Knowing there would be no mask mandate, I sent my child in a mask and encouraged her to take reasonable precautions. She is too young to be vaccinated. Our children’s hospitals are full, so I worry that she wouldn’t get adequate care if she got sick or even broke a leg.  I observed that many students weren’t wearing masks, including the student that sits next to her. Hmm.

I decided to call the nurse and ask what the procedure is if there is a COVID case in the classroom. The nurse told me that the TEA would not, at that time, allow for parents to be told if a child has COVID in their class. This changed a couple of days later – the TEA changed guidance to say that if a child gets sick in my kid’s class, I get a notification. So I asked the nurse – do the children have to quarantine if they are exposed to COVID-19?

Her answer: No, it’s a personal choice. Upon notification of positive cases in my child’s class, I observed that children in that class were being sent back to school, without masks, after being exposed. Not many parents were making the choice to quarantine.

I asked the nurse if the schools would be contact tracing. The school nurse informed me that Collin County is in charge of contact tracing and that the school reports every positive case to the county. I called the county, and the county informed me that they are not doing any contact tracing, they just send the reports up to the state. The state is very understaffed and they have made no attempts to contact trace, based on the accounts of several people I know that were exposed in a classroom and have not been contacted.

So we had no masks, no contact tracing, no quarantine. It’s no surprise that my daughter’s school has more than one positive case in every 5th grade classroom as we speak. My kid wasn’t exposed because I pulled her out Monday, and I’m not sending her back until she is vaccinated.

Texas politicians have put politics over children’s health and safety. They’re not making any attempt to mitigate this disease. This year, our kids are going to see teachers die, students hospitalized, and they will all get this infection that may damage their lungs permanently. All because Abbott wants to win a primary.

I’m angrier than I’ve ever been at Republicans, and that’s saying something.

I scarcely have spent any time opining on Afghanistan. I certainly feel awful for the soldiers that have lost their lives in a quagmire that we all should have known was coming. What’s always peculiar is that we decry the ones most recently lost. Those are somehow more tragic. I suppose when you can see the finish line it is that much more bitter to come up short.

There is a clip from George W. Bush that has been making the rounds. It came from 2002 where he was describing past efforts in Afghanistan. He mentioned initial success followed by ultimate failure. It was hard to tell whether he was simply be ironic or if he had powers of clairvoyance.

This is a basic pattern of history that also goes along with a law of human behavior. For lack of a better term, I call it the law of sunken costs. I could be a jackass and simply say I made it up, but unlike certain ex-presidents, I’m almost certain someone before me has stumbled onto this concept. I’m certainly not taking credit for it either way.

Imagine you’ve bought a car. It’s a vintage car, but it hasn’t run in years. You think to yourself that with a little hard work and a little investment you could get the car running again. So, you pour hundreds of dollars into parts, but nothing seems to be working. Hundreds turn into thousands, but there’s no change in the prognosis.

We all know eventually we will run out of money. We all know eventually we will run out of time. We all know eventually we will run out of patience. We know all of these things and yet we continue to throw good money after bad. We do this because we are all thinking the same thing. We are thinking that we’ve invested far too much to give up now.

We do this in relationships. We do this with our time. We might do this at work with an employee that just doesn’t seem to get the job done. The psychological mechanisms at work are portable across the spectrum. It’s happened before in Vietnam and Korea. It’s happened before in Afghanistan itself with the Russians. In fact, we are a product of it here in the United States. The English fell prey to the same sunken cost syndrome.

This is a historical law. Occupying countries eventually leave. It is only a question of when and under what circumstances. I’m sure the Bush administration knew this day would come. They simply hoped for the best and hoped you wouldn’t remember that it was them that got us into this mess in the first place.

The current situation has millions of Americans blaming Joe Biden. There have been mistakes and hiccups to be sure, but I’m not sure how this thing was supposed to go. If Trump were still president it would be the same deal. Sure, we could say he shouldn’t have freed the prisoners. Sure, we can say Biden should expedite the red tape and get out more refugees. We can say a lot of things. This was always how this thing was going to go down.

Afghanistan is devolving into a world where religious extremists (that represent a minority of the people) have a stranglehold on the country at large. I have no idea what that’s like. That statement couldn’t possibly describe any other situation right under our nose. Let’s ignore that and just keep whistling past the graveyard.

We can continue to finger point at different administrations over the past 20 years. All of them deserve blame in this moment. All of them perpetuated this mess. All of them contributed to the sunken cost. No one is happy when more Americans lose their lives. There’s more than enough blame to go around.

Congresscreep Dan Crenshaw filed his financial disclosure statement this morning and that’s a good thing, because it was due on the 13th and today is the 25th.

Oddly, he also filed an amendment to his financial disclosure statement this morning adding … tada, you guess it, his book royalties.

Now, why you would file an amendment – which is kinda like an oppsy – on the very same day you filed your statement is a totally mystery to me.

It looks like Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen was right. Dan The *Almost* Man included his missing royalties off a book that apparently only the RNC bought, but they did buy 400,000 worth.

By the way, as far as his California Boy properties, if you’re pretty damn good at snooping, you can find them. The one in San Diego is here. And here ya go look at Imperial Beach, where the water is more polluted than your average Republican convention goer, you can see what the beach boy is only getting between $15 to $50 grand in rentals.

NPR had a cute little infographic that showed vaccination rates by state. Click on the link and let me know if you see any discernable patterns. I could dance around the data and try to tell you all kinds of interesting facts, but I think we all know what’s going on here.

Except this story continues to evolve. Doctors and other medical professionals are exhausted. As a teacher, I see increased numbers but I don’t deal with the immediacy of it. They do. They see not only the increased numbers of unvaccinated people coming into the hospitals, but they also see the people with real medical emergencies being turned away.

However, some hospitals are fighting back. At least that’s the plan. It will be interesting to see if that kind of policy will work. For those that don’t want to click on the link, essentially some hospitals want to deny ICU beds to people that are unvaccinated. They will get care, but they will get care somewhere else in the hospital. Maybe it will be in the hall. Maybe it will be in the basement. For too many it will likely be in the morgue.

The former president held one of his rallies in Alabama and was roundly booed when he suggested his audience get the vaccine. You have to wonder if he felt like Dr. Frankenstein after letting the monster out to play. It’s become a perfect storm of idiocy and bombastic jackasses rolled up in one package.

Meanwhile, the misinformation piles up. I’ve heard some real doozies in the past few days. I’ve heard the vaccine is experimental. This is in spite of the fact that FDA gave complete approval to the Pfizer version on Monday. I heard that the vaccine killed one lady’s two friends within three days. You could utter the words “post hoc ergo propter hoc” but I’m afraid that most people just assume you are having a sneezing fit.

I’ve heard that it has the same rates as the flu. This usually follows the announcements that this person never gets the flu shot and they have never been sick. So, they trust God to keep them safe. We’ve heard all of these and more. The next thing you hear is about that person taking up a hospital bed.

I’d like to yell and scream, but I’m just too tired. I’d like to fill this space with caps locked profanity, but it wouldn’t do any good. The best thing that can happen is for all of the vaccines to get final approval and for the government to mandate vaccinations. Sure, some would refuse in a kind of Thelma and Louise blaze of glory, but we would get up to the levels necessary for herd immunity.

Some would blather on about this and that, but it’s time to just pat them on the head and give them the shot. The alternative is for all of us to end up like the town of Iraan. That’s the problem here. Even the vaccinated and masked clearly aren’t safe. That’s why lifting our hands and letting Darwin take care of it won’t work. They need to be brought kicking and screaming if we have to. The time for tolerating fools is long gone.