The first case of the COVID-19 epidemic in California was confirmed on January 25, 2020. An unidentified individual had just returned from Wuhan, China — the epicenter of what was about to become a worldwide pandemic, although at the time most people in the West did not think much of it in part by naivete, and in part due to the Chinese government’s blanket suppression of information. This was straight out of the Soviet playbook from 34 years earlier when, in 1986, the world would not have found out about the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, had the prevailing winds not blown the radioactive cloud far enough North-West to set off radiation alarms at a nuclear plant in Forsmark, Sweden, some 1500 kilometers away.
That time was already out of the ordinary for us and for the country. I had just started a new job at an early-stage startup that had no customers and enough money in the back for about a year, so we decided to put off moving to a bigger house even though the four of us had badly outgrown the one we lived in. Mama too had just finished her first year at her first job outside academia in a similarly early stage pharmaceutical company, and although they had more money in the bank, the shelter in place orders from the government meant that they had to stop all the lab work and continue only what they could do from home, which, if you’re a drug discovery company, is nothing.
The country had been ensnared by the political stunt of the second impeachment of the then President Trump, which had dragged on for some months, and climaxed in his ultimate acquittal on February 5, 2020, by which time California had already recorded a few more COVID cases.
The last time Al saw her kindergarten classroom at Jefferson Elementary and her teacher, Ms Wong, was on March 13, 2020. The next time she set foot inside the school was almost to the day a year later, on March 5, 2021, when her first grade teacher, Ms. Barb, whom Al had only seen on the computer screen, and whom we slyly called Barb Wire, invited Al for a brief visit. By then, all the teachers had been vaccinated and the school had changed its name to Ruth Acty.
Berkeley School Board’s resolution to rename Jefferson Elementary had been adopted a few months earlier, on June 10, 2020, “in support of Black Lives Matter” — an organization-slogan with no official governing body, a for-profit tax status, and a single sentence mission statement, reducible to ending “white supremacy.” The pandemic provided the perfect cover to skirt due process, and, on December 9, 2020 the School Board finally approved the new name of Ruth Acty, the first Black teacher in the Berkely public school system. (More on the renaming and its consequences here.)
Barb Wire reminded me of my own teachers. Like her, they cared about us and our education, but only insofar as it did not cross the ideological imperative. When I went to school in the 1970s USSR, the ideological imperative was to demonstrate your conviction in the greatness of the Soviet project and state. As with any ideological imperative in the history of mankind, the state exacted a higher transgression fee on teachers, who were expected to initiate us as new cannon fodder of the movement. If any of my teachers had strayed and shown softness of this conviction, the consequences would have been a lifetime of professional marginalization, financial peril and social ostracism — the very same price that in today’s America Barb Wire would pay for showing a softness of her conviction about our current ideological imperative — the “racial reckoning in America.”
Although this “racial “reckoning” is an exceptionally American predicament, prepared by the centuries of race antagonisms, there is one charactiristic that it shares with the one that oppressed my teachers: it benefits not the people it claims to patronize, but the apparatchiks of the movement, who make a living out of the enforcement of the imperative. Just like no ordinary Soviet citizen had been helped by the Soviet project, no ordinary black life will be helped by the Black Lives Matter slogan now on display at Ruth Acty Elimentary’s main office, as mandated by the unanimous resolution of the Berkeley School Board, — save for the BLM apparatchiks, who will receive cash payments for keeping the local chapters simmering.
On Monday, March 1, 2021 Barb Wire opened the week-long Black Lives Matter week, mandated by the same unanimous board resolution, which concluded that the Black History Month alone wouldn’t cut it. The class assignment was to draw the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. Barb Wire didn’t explain what it meant, just like my teachers never explained the meaning of the “people and the party are united” slogan when we drew it. The reason for this, I suspect, is that it’s against normal people’s brain chemistry to lie to seven-year-olds. It is also hard to lie to seven-year-olds precisely because they have not yet been lied to and have not yet developed social overrides that would help them to keep quiet when speaking their conscience if doing so conflicted with their well-being.
On March 10, 2021 I spoke with Ty Alper, the president of the Berkeley School Board by phone, and asked him how he feels about the fact that I had spent my childhood writing political slogans for homework, and now my children have to do the same in America. “Don’t you think,” I asked, “that the resolution you have passed amounts to the initiation of seven-year-olds into the cannon fodder of social warfare, and that sort of thing must be left up to the parents?” After a brief moment of discomfiture, Mr. Alper reached for the cliche answer, that never fails to smother any attempt at reason: “if you feel uncomfortable with it, you may ask the teacher to excuse your child from the lesson, ” — he said. “It’s not my comfort that’s the matter here,” I replied, — “it’s your lack of reason.” And that was that with Mr. Alper.
On March 8, 2021, without any warning, Berkeley Unified School District announced that all elementary schools would be reopening for full time in-person instruction on Monday, March 29, 2021, a week short of the spring break. To prepare for the reopening, the teachers would take the entire preceding week off teaching. Apparently, the teacher’s union opposed using the spring break for that purpose, though these details are never made public. The news of the reopening came as a surprise, after months of worthless online surveys, the results of which were never published, town-halls over Zoom carefully orchestrated to suppress any heterodoxy, incoherent talk of a “hybrid mode,” and systemic incompetence. The district denied that an impending lawsuit by activist parents had anything to do with the announcement. (We’d contacted the organizers with offers of support and participation.)
And so it went that today, on March 29, 2021, after a year and 16 days of house arrest, Al went to school for the first time in her first grade year.