There Will Be No Normalcy Until All Schools Open

BUCK: Just to bring you up to speed on this for a second, Chicago public schools, as I understand it are — yes, they are actually, I’m looking at it right now — closed for a third straight day. So it’s the dead of winter in Chicago, which, as I understand it, it’s pretty cold, and they have locked kids out of schools there. They’ve thrown all kinds of disarray into the home lives of parents who now have to figure out, well, what do we do and how do we handle this?

Basically because the Chicago unions, teachers unions think that they have the kind of power, Clay, where we’re gonna be able to get away with demanding what is essentially gonna be a weeks-long paid vacation. This is not about safety. This is just about leverage inside Democrat Party political apparatus, and it just shows they don’t care about kids — and I’m sorry: Every day that Fauci does not say anything about this is a day that should remind everybody that he doesn’t really care about what’s going on with children.

CLAY: It’s well said, and this is where I think that there is such a massive disconnect, oftentimes, between what Washington, D.C., is focused on and what the real people of America are focused on. I think about this a lot because I am a dad, and I know there are lot of dads and moms out there, grandmas and grandpas, aunt and uncles responsible for kids helping to raise. What do you think people in Chicago are thinking, Buck?

Do you think they’re sitting around on January 6th thinking, “Oh, this is the one-year anniversary of that protest that got out of hand in the Capitol; I want my political leaders to be spending an entire day memorializing that,” or are they thinking, “I was expecting for my kids to be in school today. I was expecting that I was gonna drop ’em off, that I was gonna put ’em on the bus, that I was going to know that I could go to work all day.

“Grandma or grandpa who’s helping to watch in the evenings, that I can take care of the young babies or that I can be responsible for my job, mom and dad everywhere,” and then out of nowhere, the Chicago teachers unions just show up and clothesline, effectively, every single parent in the Chicago area. It’s not just Chicago, by the way. There are parents all over the country — Atlanta, Milwaukee.

I was looking at a roster of all the different states and city school districts where kids are being sent home. And this, to me, is the essence of the question that we’re in right now. You cannot get back to normalcy until schools are 100% back open, Buck, and until parents know that they can do their jobs and their kids are gonna be educated and taken care of. So this disconnect I believe is, first of all, wrong, but it’s fertile terrain to be exploited and taken advantage of and ripped to the high heavens by people who actually look at data and care about kids.