STEALING TWO YEARS FROM THE YOUNG

On a warm Columbus Day mid-morning when I was in the Third Grade, we had a fire drill. My class filed out of our old wing of Valley School and reassembled in the sun. Right across the street from the exit where 150 of us students stood and waited, there was a forty-foot-tall evergreen tree. The top of the tree began to sway back and forth.

Looking into the tree, I could partially see two boys rocking the treetop from within. As we fire drillers waited below, one of the tree climbers started yelling, “Oshinskie! Mark Oshinskie!”

Everyone on the ground looked at me. One of the teachers demanded that I “Tell those boys to come down from there!”

I felt like some hostage taker’s father asked by the cops to talk his son into surrendering. But I thought it was cool that those kids were up there, doing that. I smiled and pretended I didn’t hear her.

I peered further into the tree and figured out, mostly from the voice, that it was the sturdy, dark brown crew-cutted, thick-eyebrowed, narrow-eyed, wide-jawed Johnny Weyrauch. I knew Johnny from one of the municipal summer rec day camps—there were three, depending on which neighborhood you lived in—in our town. Johnny and I were rivals. Johnny was a year older than I was and a really good athlete. I finished second to him for our 8-9 year-old group’s Camper of the Year trophy that I wanted so much. I looked Johnny up on the Net a few years ago. His namesake, presumably his son, was some record-setting receiver at Lafayette College. It didn’t surprise me.

Johnny was able to create mischief on that Columbus Day because he went to the crosstown Our Lady of Perpetual Help School, and the Catholic school kids got the day off. (My Mom explained to me that many Catholics were Italian). I knew some of the nuns there from my after-school CCD classes. They wore somber habits, which covered them in black from their shoulders to their ankles. A long black veil topped stiff white linen garments that covered their necks, chests, ears and hair. Only their faces were visible. Rosary beads hung from their waists. The sisters were countercultural. Otherworldly.

Some were kindly but others were strict, or even hostile. The latter cohort would berate you in front of the other kids and occasionally dish out some corporal punishment. Back then, kids were made to understand—by big kids and nuns—that being disrespectful might subject you to some curbside justice.

But no nun-—not even Sister Charles—ever made students wear ineffective, unhealthy, dehumanizing masks all day.

Personally, I’d rather have been hit a few times than wear a mask for seven hours. Being hit doesn’t hurt much, or for long. Further, unlike masking, being hit would at least involve a rational relationship between the punishment and the ostensible goal. And if a nun hit me, I probably would have deserved it. What kid deserves to be masked?

CCD classes were conducted in the immaculate, austere, almost new, Mid-Century Modern OLPH classrooms, undecorated except for a long chart of cursive letters and a single crucifix above the blackboard at the front of the room. There were on the walls no student crayon drawings or cut-outs of Jack-O-Lanterns or Abraham Lincoln, as in my public-school classroom. It seemed that in Catholic school there were only holy days; secular holidays were not acknowledged. There were 40-something perfectly aligned, graffiti-free desks, almost twice as many as in my public-school classroom. Plus, OLPH boys had to wear white shirts with ties; that troubled me more than anything else did. That, and the corridor walls covered with light-green tiles. In contrast, my then sixty-year-old public school had warped, squeaky wood floors. It felt lived-in.

The sisters were good communicators. They delivered direct messages about life, death, God and morality. But Catholic school seemed stark and excessively structured; I didn’t want to go there full-time. When she heard that I was misbehaving at Valley, my Lutheran mother threatened to send me to OLPH. I examined my conscience and modified my conduct. Suburban Sixties Scared Straight.

Columbus Day and All Saints Day were the only two days I would rather have been an OLPH student. Johnny was basking in, and flaunting, his Columbus Day freedom. Take that, public school chumps!

Still, it was good to hear and see him through the tree’s branches; we hadn’t played together since August. And having a badass kid give me a shout out—before there were “shout-outs”—gave me street cred—before there was “street cred.”

But after capturing the attention of the earthbound, Johnny added, for the whole third grade to hear, “I beat you for the trophy!”

And he did, fair and square.

Though he was a year older than me.

Yesterday, I went back to my hometown, Oakland, NJ, to visit my parents. I had an hour to kill, so I drove around town. Oakland has about a hundred streets, some of them long. Scanning the blocks, I remembered people I knew, and stuff I did, all over town.

Oakland had thousands of Baby Boom kids. I still have many hundreds of memories of time we shared. Most of these memories are good. Some that weren’t good were unavoidable, and I learned from them. Some mistakes were avoidable; I just failed to avoid them. You learn from that, too. Though sometimes you forget what you know. And some of the negative experiences became funny once I could look back on them, detached from the adversity or disappointment then presented. Like Johnny beating me for that trophy.

Besides Johnny, I met hundreds of other kids in my neighborhood from 4-18, in summer rec camp from ages 6-12, playing in town sports leagues from 8-15, or working at the swimming pool park as a garbageman and grass cutter from 15-17.

But I met the vast majority of kids in school. School’s educational value is, by far, secondary to the social experience bound up in assembling hundreds of kids from all over town—there were 1700 kids in our high school—for 182 days/year; well over 200 days if you play school sports on weekends and school vacations, as I did. I’m still in contact with some of these people. I occasionally, randomly think of many others. We shared and shaped each other’s lives and memories: the faces, voices, pranks, presentations, challenges, wisecracks, crushes and, above all, the personalities. Spending all that time together made human affinity, as well as some antipathy and conflict—normal social development—inevitable.

College social life also has significant value. Though you interact regularly with a smaller subset than in K-12. And college entails more solo study time.

Much of the past two years have been stolen from kids by teachers and their unions, college administrators and opportunistic Democrat politicians who knew kids were never at risk nor significant viral spreaders but closed schools and colleges anyway to opportunistically create, in the words of General Westmoreland during the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, “maximum consternation,” and unprecedented and unparalleled social, economic and electoral control. In the part of the brain containing so many school-derived friendships and memories that still can make me happy, locked out kids will have a two-year gap containing largely screen time. Even upon belatedly returning to school, students have worn, and been surrounded by peers who wear, alienating, voice muffling, smile-covering masks.

Not all years of one’s life are of equal social value; one’s youth has much greater overall value—both in shaping a person and having fun—than do subsequent years. And some things—like tree climbing—you can only do at certain ages. Further, your early experiences are prologue that enable you to proceed to better manage ensuing tasks and challenges.

Moreover, people meet people through people. And chances for meeting people are random and time-limited: if you don’t meet someone this day/week/year, you may never do so. Curtailing social time can have a reverse ripple effect: when you spend time alone, you miss chances to meet people to whom others would have introduced you. Too many people, like ships, pass each other in the middle of the night.

The mental health damage from school and college closures and masking will last the lifetimes of those who have endured this adult-imposed political theater. That’s what happens when you transmogrify a two-year slice of someone’s life; it’s like some dark movie where the protagonist emerges, profoundly disoriented, from a long coma. Except that the school and college closures really happened, and on a mass scale.

Closing and masking schools and colleges for a virus that only threatens the old has been a massive crime against humanity. I’ll never forget that politicians, teachers’ unions, teachers and college administrators have stolen so much irreplaceable in-person time from the young people they professed to care about.