Plagues & Peoples Part 1: Amerika is devouring its children

Examining the quickly changing scene of education and COVID-19 in the U.S.

(Editor’s note: Jane Hawley, a writer and educator in California, has contributed this timely post. Share with a friend!).

As the debate about reopening schools across America rages on, I have been posting about how art from previous protest movements applies to our country’s current experience of the pandemic. The name of the poster included with this missive says it all: AMERIKA IS DEVOURING ITS CHILDREN. 

This silkscreen poster was created in 1970 by Jay Belloli, an art history student at UC Berkeley, after the invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and the Kent State and Jackson State shootings. Students organized public silkscreen workshops across many campuses to create political posters. According to Docs Populi, UC Berkeley’s faculty at the College of Environmental Design “encouraged the use of campus facilities for a short-lived workshop that created an estimated 50,000 copies of hundreds of works.”

Belloli’s design for AMERIKA IS DEVOURING ITS CHILDREN draws from Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s famous painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” (c. 1819-1823). Warned by his own parents that his children would overthrow him, Saturn swallowed his own progeny to retain his power. We can assume Belloli created the poster to comment on both the drafting of young Americans to fight in a brutal and unjust war and the slaughter of university students on their campuses by the police and National Guard for protesting that war. 

This poster can be updated for our current moment to relate to both the reopening of American schools and universities during a clear surge of COVID-19 and to the Trump administration’s willingness to allow so many Americans to be killed by a disease that has been controlled by many other countries across the globe with the help of sound science, governmental support of citizens, and clear public health regulations. We don’t know everything about COVID-19, but we do know that children get sick and die from the disease (though at a lower rate than adults) and that teens experience the disease in a way that is more similar to adults than children.

We also know that dying of this virus is not the only consequence. A host of long term effects are currently being tracked and studied, many of them likely to cause lifelong damage. On top of those facts, educators clearly understand how schools function as disease vectors within communities. Even if a child gets mildly sick, they carry the potential to infect dozens to hundreds of other people in higher risk categories.

As I write this message, approximately 140,000 Americans have died from complications related to COVID-19. Each one of those people represents a person who was important to someone else: a parent, a sibling, a child, a spouse, a friend. These numbers are only going to continue to go up as the federal government refuses to plan and enact a comprehensive plan in response to the pandemic. In an echo of New York City's situation in the spring, refrigerated trucks are being brought into Texas because morgues are filling up.

This is a state whose governor is currently mandating that school districts must provide on campus instruction for all students who want it. The public is just now realizing how essential schools have become. Many children rely on schools for one or more of their daily meals. And parents are relying on schools for childcare and health services for their children. Just three months ago, America was praising teachers for their work. Now teachers are being vilified by certain members of the public for being concerned for their own health as well as the lives of American children. 

Trump’s mandate that schools reopen without proper resources and in areas of the country where the virus is spiraling out of control is homicidal. He and his cronies are turning the reopening of schools into a flashpoint of conservative culture wars while they have utterly failed in taking any significant steps to contain the virus on a national scale that would ensure a safe environment for our children and staff to return to campuses. It is their fault that children are not going back to school, not the educators who are fighting back against unsafe working conditions.

As an educator, I can tell you I would rather be back in the classroom. I fully understand the immense sacrifice that students and families face this fall. Refusing to go back to school is the ultimate sign to the Trump administration that we will not allow these corrupt politicians and their science-denying followers to devour America’s children.