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Kate's avatar

My daughter goes to a Chicago public high school. The public schools finally, about 1.5 weeks ago, lifted the mask requirement, though this was communicated with insipid emails about how we were a community and had to care for each other as we moved forward blah blah blah. The heartbreaking thing to me is that my daughter still wears her mask at school, as she says all the kids do. We are very much an anti-vax, anti-mandate, this-is-control-not-science household, yet she wears the mask. She won't talk about it. Yes, peer pressure is very strong in high school. I also sometimes fear these kids have pulled into themselves so much that they're afraid to show their faces.

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SCA's avatar

Oh man thank you. Thank you for this. Because I've been saying this--the introductory part of this post--for almost half a century, and it's nice to have some company from someone more credentialed to discuss matters of, you know, science.

Funny what a long road it is that leads to hell. We've been primed for getting close to a century to this bullshit, and it's been the destruction of the concept of human agency in, like, everything. Now you're not a fucking drunk who's destroyed his family but a patient with substance abuse disorder.

In my early twenties I and a close friend founded a neighborhood Al-Anon group. We'd grown up with alcoholic dads and she had an alcoholic husband and a young child and she was dealing with a pretty overwhelming situation. So she asked me to do this with her.

And week after week it was the same story. It was almost entirely women in the group, and it was the same, same, same story and it never changed. And that mantra of acceptance for what you cannot change made you just never change anything. Because your husband wasn't a self-indulgent bastard who didn't give a shit if the family was gonna lose the house or the kids went to school after having cried all night. He had a disease.

And here we are! No one is responsible for anything. If you have a mental illness, seeking durable treatment for it is your last responsibility. You have full permission to whine or weep to your therapist for decades rather than grabbing yourself by your own head hair and struggling toward health. You have full permission to demand that your delusion be taken as reality and the entire medical, educational and legal establishments will let you take their hands and walk down that continuing road to implosion with you.

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