I found an article when opening up a new Firefox browser tab. It’s entitled, “The Crushing Reality of Zoom School“.
Are students and parents doing this badly?
The Hutterites have their society. Everyone exists communally – except for the cellphones, allure of “the English” (the rest of us), alcohol consumption, and the slow grind toward blending in with the outside world.
The Mennonites have a somewhat similar society except less restrictive and communal. Men dress as they please, women dress traditionally, and families are large.
Bhutanese refugees come students come working stiffs went from an agrarian culture of water buffalo, turnips, and rice to fast food, car loans, and huge monthly rent payments in, comparatively, a freezing-cold country.
The hippies and dropouts from the ’60s onward had their nonconformist ways, saying peace and love is better than greed and war, that living close to nature and … high … is the way to go, the way to nirvana, mokti, moksha – heaven.
The rest of us – not just North American culture – have adopted the life of farming our kids out to dedicated, designated ‘teachers’ rather than teaching them themselves. Is that not one of the main tasks of a parent – to teach? Instead, we make money our sole goal. He who has the biggest bank account when he dies, wins. Fast-pace, hectic, full of work and full of debt, and (apparently) constant arguments with family members. What the hell have we made?
Then, when it comes crashing down, when a virus hits that affects badly anyone who is in contact with it and tortures everyone else with stress, we wonder where we went wrong. We wonder, “How come this happened?”
You’re not serious, are you? You’re actually asking, “Why?”
When your main goal in life is to buy new rims for your jacked-up, overly-loud pickup; when seeing your friends’ or neighbours’ fashion makes you want to go out and one-up them, when risking others’ lives on the highway by tailgating and passing someone who is doing the speed limit just so that you can get to your campsite faster so that you can set up your stupidly huge 5th-wheel toy hauler faster so that you can display how big your pair is … Not sure what is worse – watching you do this or knowing that you’re too stupid to know how stupid you are. You are driven mad by consumerism and consumption. Are you seriously proud of your truck? Did you design or build it, or just pay a company money so you could sit in the seat and roar up and down the street? You’re a circus clown, a prostitute, a flim-flam man.
A teacher gives an assignment to a student. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The child comes back with the completed assignment. It reads, “Happy.” The teacher says, “No, you’re supposed to say, ‘doctor’ or ‘scientist’ or ‘lawyer’. You can’t make money just being ‘happy’. You didn’t understand the assignment. The student replies, “You don’t understand life.”
So … perhaps it isn’t Zoom’s fault. Perhaps you’ve (we’ve) complicated life so fucking badly that it is impossible to understand the basics – to be happy.