We are losing a generation of kids and have not long to fix it.

The "Long Winter" of lockdowns and Pandemic deaths has been followed by the worst Cold Spell since the 1980s - at least here in Missouri. This is exposing a horrible mistake. Once the infrastructure for "Online School" was in place educators now have a new option ready for days of inclement weather or whatever. My district calls these "A.M.I." days, Alternative Means of Instruction. 

 Whatever this means in theory, in practice it is this: 1) At 5:44 a.m. Parents get an email that their child will not be in school. Parents are also supposed to not just ensure their child is clothed/fed/sheltered but will need to take on the full time task of aiding their student with assignments and policing their student to get their assignments done. 2) Instead of instruction, the teacher will send a link to a video or a text to read and perhaps a quiz that the student is supposed to self-instruct themselves on. This is, of course, not adequate for instruction and this is the very reason why teachers and schools exist. 3) The teachers will then grade/judge the untaught/unsupported student's work as a failure and perhaps report the parent to some kind of secret police list or whatever happens when your child fails. 

 This allows the school to not take a "Snow Day" and not add a day to the school year in the Summer and all it costs is the loss of a day of the child's developmental success and the mental health of the working parents. Snow days were fine - they were better - we need to return to this as soon as possible. An email saying "Read this chapter" is not the same thing as an hour in class. It is not a substitute or even an acceptable facsimile. This is my new crusade and I am reaching out to my school district ASAP. An entire Generation of children are being failed by the horrible idea that interacting with a glowing rectangle can be a full substitute for the entire community of people that make a child's education. We made this policy, we can unmake it. We need to.

Childhood, Meaning, Reality and Cyberpunk

Warning:  Rambling without much insight ahead

It's early 2021 and I am in a short gap between managing technology and people for the Decennial Census and supporting tax software for Intuit helping as a large number of people want to make sure stimulus is properly accounted for or claimed (if it wasn't processed).  My wife is about to fly off to the East Coast to help with critical care during the pandemic for a month and it's very clear that the current events of the world impact our lives.   I'm glad I can work from home as my boys are still in some modified pandemic schedule for school, even if working with financial software isn't some aspirational goal. Sometimes it's easy to feel like we are adrift on bigger currents - not the masters of our own ships. 

I have had some time to do more - but the pandemic makes doing more with other people irresponsible.  The local health department states getting a vaccine for the general population isn't likely in Missouri until May.... so here we are, entertaining ourselves at home.

I've started reading fiction again and gaming again and two things from 2020 I am enjoying are Cyberpunk 2077 and Ready Player Two.  These have both been in the works for some time and show signs of a work that had its vision change as the thing came to be.  Ready Player Two is a sequel to a novel written in 2011 and Cyberpunk 2077 has been in development since 2013.  Both have some kind of theme of returning to childhood, the meaning of those memories in how they shape who we are and how we interpret the world.  

I'm writing this after reading about how the Ready Player Two's protagonist is perplexed by the idea that despite living in ridiculous luxury and comfort he feels the need to re-create his childhood of sleeping in a laundry room in the impoverished conditions he came from, how he needs to memorialize the little places of respite he had carved out in his harsh world.  I'm writing this after a Cyberpunk side character takes you underwater to her childhood town where she was raised in humble conditions by her grandparents in some little community with one diner, one school, etc... and she has this moment where she describes local burgers as too greasy, too big... but to childhood me it was the best thing I had ever eaten and these sentiments are resonating with me.

My childhood had... swings... moments of plenty and comfort and moments where the adults in my life took efforts to keep me from worrying about how uncertain things were. There were times where you knew all the adults around you wanted you in their lives and times where some of them clearly did not. I had great parents who made good, if tough, choices 90% of the time and grandparents who were a blessing for any child to have in their lives.  I spent a Summer with my grandmother in the Ozarks in a home that was essentially one big room, I lived in one of the most dangerous zip codes in America in the 90s, and I also spend much of the 80s in what one of my friends called "A mansion".  My parents each were/weren't in parts of my life growing up a and I would like to thing this has given me a more complete view of being human than I could have had. 

A ridiculously happy memory for me is playing "no equipment" tackle football in a fenced in yard with glass bottles and wrappers on Cypress and Kensington with about 8 kids from the neighborhood and just not caring about much in the world.

Cyberpunk does a great job of visiting critical memories (there is a great McGuffin/Plot Device that makes this possible and necessary) and making you spend a moment to think about how essential some of these have on who we become and the world you live in.  It's weird because I can remember the room where I opened my first P.C. to add RAM, where I first wrote a batch file save to a floppy drive and changed a BIOS setting to have the system boot to play DOOM on a 486SX25 processor.  I remember the garage my dad and I set up a punching bag and weight set in.  That was the same home I dove in the world of paper and dice RPGs, D&D, Cyberpunk 2020, Werewolf, Vampire, Mage.... but most of all Shadowrun.  In a weird Meta way, this experience - seeing these plots and themes revisited but not as some little niche product but with multi-million dollar budgets and talented professional staff working for years... it is like visiting that world we imagined back then.  A friend of mine (A cop holed up with the Covid-19 until it runs it's course who finds himself with time again) told me it reminds him of what he pictured in his head during the Shadowrun game sessions we had as kids.

I just took out my two loving dogs at sunrise and watched them play next to the trees, swing set, garden, and bushes in the back yard of my quite sizeable house.  This isn't bragging, just a setup that the life I live is the life I thought I was supposed to strive for - some kind of end prize for hard work and saving.

I also own a quite nice VR headset - Pandemic 2020 was a good year for VR - and can set up a "Home"
area where you load and interface with program and so on - they have luxury apartments and ski lodges and moon colonies as choices.... and what do I use?  A grungy setup with graffiti and alleys that reminds me of the most austere years of my childhood.  If I had a therapist, I would want to get some feedback on how strange it is to feel that need to return to our childhood - even if our present is objectively better.

The lure of nostalgia trap, which many readers and critics missed, was the whole theme of Ready Player One - that given limitless potential to create from the well of our imaginations we often end up limiting ourselves to recreate the nostalgia of youth and that growth requires moving beyond that.  Don't live in the memories of the past while you can still be making a present wonderful enough for forging new memories.

My grandparents, my parents... only my mother remains alive.  My father asked me to repeat back some memories he had shared with me - quitting smoking, starting to live better - of being the same age as Elvis and having a son later in life and learning, while his youngest son was being born, that Elvis had just died in his 40s... it made my father reconsider how he was treating his body and his obligation to take care of himself and live...  but I don't remember all of the details right.   This distressed him, his memories, his life story - from being a child of the Great Depression, his high school pole vaulting, his time in the Infantry and overseas, his decades in the steel mill, his building a business, his time as a husband and father... all of those were going to fade away with his old frail body.  He had shared some things with me but, of course, it could only be a fraction -  most of which would also fade away in time.

And finally, that sad inevitable realization that who we are, what we are is so much a collection of moments and memories that live on mostly in ourselves... and that they will fade... that was a big part of one of the first seminal Cyberpunk works - Blade Runner - a film written by two men in their early forties, a common age to realize that truth that we are impermanent and will fade... has a character use an artificially shortened life span to come to his own realization about this after struggling with it for two hours:

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die".

 So it goes, the need to celebrate and learn from the past and grow into the future... I am cautiously optimistic at the moment - we are coming out of the pandemic's dark winter and have the opportunity for better things ahead.  I want to share an article from the right now - a list of fairly well thought out things that should give us all reason to be at least a little hopeful:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90591674/21-reasons-to-hope-in-2021