Yes, you can mitigate distancing in school, not ideally but it can be done.

For example, we could eliminate rank-and-file rows and space desks around the room (learning in the round).

Instead of having everyone change classes at once and cramming hallways with potential virus carriers, it could be done classroom by classroom. Yes, this will extend the school day, but isn’t that worth it to help ensure good health?

Principals can work with teachers, students and parents to generate ideas to make this difficult situation function without torpedoing education and wrecking safety.

How sad!

How sad that we are denied what mental health experts tell us we desperately need in a time of crisis: human contact.

How sad that in trying to stamp out the virus through isolation, we may be stamping out our humanity.

How sad that public officials seem bent on ignoring the most insidious side effects of this medication, even when taken as directed.

Reopening should not be positioned simply as choosing profits over people. It is far more nuanced than that because the future of human nature is at stake. We need a solution with that as top-of-mind, for the scientists and public officials.

No one harvests with scythes anymore, either. The Caucuses are a bygone relic from a bygone era.

“Religious liberty” can never be a cudgel to impinge on the fundamental constitutional rights of all. Any attempt to do so is the first step toward theocracy.

Before Reps. Axne and Finkenauer start piling up votes that can be used to “prove” that they are not progressive Democrats, someone needs to school them on how these traps work and how to avoid them.

While committed white supremacists may indeed maintain some of the virulent ideas mentioned, this does not explain the reaction of so many “ordinary” people we don’t usually associate with that ilk. What does explain it is the perceived upheaval of previously insular communities such as are prominent in the rural Midwest and South, as well as on the coasts. (Much of New York state went for Trump.)

For decades, residents of those communities had similar orientation as to mores, religion, politics and economic factors. Those have been challenged by exposure to the outside world via the internet, by the Great Recession and by immigration among other things. In many ways, this is similar to how Japan changed by first contact with Europe in the middle of the 19th century.

With the social, political and economic order seeming to slip away, many residents of those communities are attempting to preserve them by clinging to a past that cannot be sustained.

Unfortunately, there may be no way to face this except by waiting for this generation to die out and for succeeding generations, which have been shown to be more adaptable to this sort of change, to take over.