Acceptable Sacrifices

You can't swing a cat these days without smacking into three arguments about opening schools.  Not surprising, since September is coming very quickly, and there's a lot of thinking, talking, and especially working to be done.

I've been thinking and reading and listening and it's clear that there's still no good answer.  But this post is just a distraction, a way of avoiding The Big One about school openings.  It's about a tiny piece of a conversation I came across somewhere a couple of weeks ago, which I keep coming back to when I think of the more meta aspects of the school opening issue.

According to the CDC, about 700 American children aged 14 and under drown each year.  About 3,500 go to the emergency room for non-fatal incidents.

So:  Why do we let children swim?

Don't worry, this is not (entirely) a serious question - it's a thought experiment.  We let children swim because, given the level of safety we have established, it is worth 700 lives and 3,500 injuries to keep American kids swimming.

When we're being honest and thoughtful, all conversations about re-opening anything are conversations about how many lives we're willing to sacrifice to achieve the opening goal.  Because the only way to get that number to zero is to lock everybody down tighter than we can imagine.

So the question behind all of these conversations about reopening schools is:  How many lives are we willing to sacrifice in order to have some semblance of school?

Watch out for that cat...