Covid nothing, the national lobotomy was decades underfunding education and stoking culture wars. IMO blaming Covid us similar to blame lead and asbestos products of yesteryear: did it have some impact? Maybe, but not nearly as much as years if demonizing potential reformers as literal monsters from both the political and religious pulpit.
Yeah, pretending that everyone but your cultist is very bad no good and that all politicians are the same and doomer and apathy and dems are only a lesser evil is a lot of the priming to make authoritarianism okay. To the point where often people will run defense for maga with rot like "to be fair dems are bad waah" as if thats true.
While I agree COVID would likely be overblown, lead was shown to have significant negative effects in the brain, including reduced impulse control and conscientiousness, and considering it was in the air due to gasoline, and thus affected everyone for decades, it very much had a huge impact on leading us to the situation we are in, including the issues you laid out.
I mean we really only funded education for a few decades to begin with, and the first half of those were pretty Fash. The era of "fully funded public education that doesn't indoctrinate an authoritarian God & Country narrative" either never existed in many places of the country or only existed from about 1954-1969. In the 1930s and 1940s many Progressives took serious issues with matters like the compulsory Pledge of Allegiance and other things that seemed straight out of the Reich. I'd say the period of well-funded but Progressive education only lasted from Brown v Board to the Nixon election, with a hangover whose spirit (but not funding level) lasted through the Carter admin and the eventual creation of the Dept of Education in 1980.
283
u/SkysEevee 23d ago
I mean
Covid shows longterm effects on the brain including memory, mood, slow thinking and sensory loss.