Politicizing the virus

To the Editor

Public schools and universities debate physical reopening in the teeth of the virus. State deficits to fight the pandemic foretell no school funding increases, so now the White House threatens loss of federal aid. Is reopening really for the indisputable value of education, is it for day care and the economy, or perhaps less benevolent reasons?

The right describes universities as leftist collections of elite intellectuals who hate America. Older professors and university employees are at far greater virus risk than their students. Urban school students are often from minority families whose children will infect them though they may have no adequate healthcare. Did the administration calculate professors, teachers, employees and minority families would vote unfavorably in November? Might the White House wish them not to vote, or lose their jobs or unions?

Meat plant employees, often minority voters, were decreed back to work on pain of losing jobs and any unemployment compensation without enforceable assurances of adequate PPE, a safe workplace, virus healthcare benefits, and federal virus regulations to protect worker health. When forced back, they got sick, and community spread predictably ensued. The plants denied liability for workers compensation and the resulting pandemic. If employees didn't return, they were fired. The employees and communities, likely unfavorable voters, were expendable collateral damage to the reopening economy.

Healthcare frontliners whose medical expertise strongly opposes and exposes administration incompetence are also daily collateral damage in the virus meatgrinder.

Is there a pattern? By politicizing school and economic reopening, are unfavorable voters now selected as collateral damage to the virus to affect the vote? Dictators historically but less subtly sent intellectuals, teachers, doctors, minorities and “immigrants” to the camps where one couldn't vote if they lived that long.

Steve Monroe Sonora