Doug Ford and Stephen Lecce's Miserable Fantasy

 

So, on a certain level, I understand where Doug Ford and his unqualified Education Minister Stephen Lecce were coming from in their policy decisions with regards to COVID-19 and Ontario's schools. Being anti-government sector ideologues, they simply didn't want to spend the money to provide extra space and extra teachers and improved ventilation and any of the other safeguards that a highly contagious airborne, respiratory virus that has a fatality rate of around 1.00% (as opposed to the less contagious annual flu's 0.01% fatality rate). 

They did not want to spend the money. I get that.

I also understand that they wanted to PRETEND that nothing bad would happen when kids went back to crowded classrooms, with closed windows. They wanted to believe that the virus somehow knows that a potential host is between the ages of 5 and 18 and therefore, somehow magically knows to leave that person completely alone. They wanted to believe that since young people's bodies are far more energetic on so many levels (and they are therefore most likely to present as asymptomatic) that this meant (to Ford and Lecce) that young people actually don't get the virus AT ALL!!!

So, they wanted to fantasize, pretend, hope, pray, rationalize, ... whatever, ... that nothing bad would happen when they put the kids back in the classrooms without any effective safeguards against COVID-19. I get that. Wishful thinking. I know what that is.

But here's the thing: I don't see how they couldn't anticipate the CONSEQUENCES of their stupidity. I don't see how anyone intelligent enough to know to wipe their asses after shitting (which I assume Ford and Lecce both are) wouldn't easily be able to move on to Step Three of this scenario. Which is that OF COURSE a lot of students would get infected with the virus, even if it didn't affect them. And that schools would become super-spreaders, where anyone older (as, say, many teachers) WOULD get sick and perhaps die. And that furthermore, young people who picked up the virus at school would go out into the world, on buses, or subways, or walking down crowded sidewalks, and they would take the virus into their homes to infect family members (some of whom would get sick and perhaps die) and that these family members would themselves take the virus out with them when they went to work or to the store.

That's how viruses work. That's what "going viral" literally means.

So yeah; I GET that you didn't want to spend the money. And I GET that you fantasized about how you could avoid spending the money and that things would be fine. But I don't get how, as functioning adults, you actually BELIEVED that you could get away with it!

Check this out: I don't have any appreciable talent or charisma but I wish I was a rich and famous Hollywood Superstar. I fantasize about travelling to Hollywood and getting "discovered" and being a rich and famous Hollywood Superstar. Now, unless I spend an excessive amount of time on this fantasy, it's a harmless pipedream. But were I to actually go to Hollywood and try to become a star I would have crossed the line into sheer stupidity and madness.

And that's what Ford and Lecce did. Because they're stupid assholes. Self-centred, lazy, stupid, ideological, confused fuckwits. I already know about Doug Ford's numerous complications. I really didn't know who Stephen Lecce was other than annoying. I went to his Wikipedia page and discovered that he caught the eye of stephen harper (as certain young men tend to do to that opponent of gay marriages) when he was the head of some "conservative" political club at his university. So harper hired him into his office and made him [I'm speculating] one of the "boys in short pants" who supervised MPs and Cabinet Ministers that used to be complained about. He's a bullshit Public Relations peddler and he worked for used-car salesman/Ontario MPP Al Paladini. Now he's in charge of education. And while I'm not the sort of person who demands that only certified experts are qualified to help manage public duties, I tend to be leery of conservative con-artists who hate public goods and who also hate worker-centered institutions such as trade unions, such as the ones that Ontario teachers belong to.

Ford and Lecce are murderously incompetent ideologues who should never have been elected to power. They have blood on their hands and they can eat shit and die.