The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my townâs was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didnât just âpostponeâ a surgery at one pointâ when I was fifteenâ to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.
So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said âyup, youâve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.â
So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, âno, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.â So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.
A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like⌠a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.
So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. âAh, well perhaps they didnât know,â you may very well say. âMaybe his parents didnât notice!â No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.
The kidâs parentsâŚâŚ.. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didnât want to risk hurting his precious âperfect attendanceâ record. They figured that since he wasnât, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.
Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he âcouldnât afford to missâ. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.
This entire attitude needs to die. Itâs dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because theyâre afraid of flunking out.
And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! Itâs 2019 and weâre flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like âactually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless americaâ
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