Where are the grownups?

What do we do as the COVID death toll approaches 200,000?

We send the kids out to play football.

Yup. In the face of ever-climbing COVID numbers the folks charged with the education and safety of our children have decided their most appropriate pandemic response is to send the boys to comingle, mask-less and intimately, in the locker room and on the football practice field, then send them off to share the viral load with equally infection-prone fellows from neighboring towns, all for the greater glory of Little Town High.

And there’ll also be a volleyball season so girls have equal opportunity to be infected too.

Meanwhile universities are on campus-wide lockdown, kids are attending class in their bedrooms, and people isolated in hospitals, nursing homes and care facilities can’t be visited by friends and family for fear of the spreading infection.

Seven weeks ago, based upon the medically supported observation that persistent, repeated close contact is a prime vector for the transmission of COVID-19, the Minnesota State High School League chose to delay the sanctioned high school football and volleyball seasons until spring – hopefully a time when the worst of the virus had passed and play could resume with reasonable safety.

On Monday the League, bowing to pressure from sports-parents and long-in-the-tooth high school sports fans, reversed that decision – in the face of the observation by the chair of the League’s medical advisory committee that, as far as the danger of COVID contagion was concerned, the threat “hasn’t changed that much.”

But then again, what is the real threat of disease and death when fun, games, and adolescent glory are at stake?

Time was, the grownups would have something to say about that.

Remember grownups? Y’know, the head-shaking no-funski’s that put the kibosh on all manner of whoop-di-doo ideas? The grumps and grinches that made us put on a coat, wear our galoshes, a hat and mittens because it was cold outside and keeping warm trumped looking cool? Remember the lunch ladies who made us eat our peas before they’d hand out the ice cream? The mean mom who took the bulb out of your bedroom lamp because it was past your bedtime and you needed your sleep. Remember them? Grownups? The old farts that got in the way of all the fun stuff and made us suffer for our own good?

And it was for our own good … even back then, we knew that.

Where the heck are the grownups now?

They’re not on the Minnesota State High School League board, that’s for sure. Putting players, the players’ families, the players’ families’ friends and co-workers … and their families, friends, and co-workers at increased risk because they couldn’t stand up to the whining of a coterie of self-interested, self-absorbed mommies and daddies isn’t the work of grownups worthy the name. Neither the school administrators who will go along with this medical malfeasance.

But then grownups have been in critically short supply for a long time. From the temperamental toddler with the keys to the White House and an uncensored twitter account, to the make-believe militia men who insist they have a constitutional right to spew virus and spread disease, to the sycophantic politicos who never learned the need and the value of saying “No”, we’re approaching a culture where the only thing any of us is willing to sacrifice is someone else’s well-being. We’re replacing “E pluribus unum” with “You’re not the boss of me” as our national motto -- and doing it to our peril.

So, in the face of the pandemic we demand our right to hang around in bars, then go to church to pray we don’t get sick. Nearly 200,000 dead and 7 million sick are a pretty good indication that this is not a particularly effective disease fighting strategy. But no matter, we send our boys out to play football while the girls bat a volleyball around the gym.

And hope for the best.

Where are the grownups? We need the grownups.