David Inoue
This past week, my child’s school exploded with the news that the school would go virtual for the week after Thanksgiving to accommodate families that planned to travel out of the area for the holiday. In the absence of a Covid vaccine for children under 12, all children at the elementary school must quarantine for one week after traveling outside the D.C., Maryland or Virginia area.
I’ll be honest, this policy has resulted in some stretching of the definitions of travel in the region for our family, even as we made last spring break a trip to a rather chilly Ocean City, Md., and this past Indigenous People’s Day weekend to Cape Charles, Va.
Both locations, while still in the allowable travel zone to avoid quarantine, are but just a few miles different, in one case even a shorter distance, and we could have found ourselves in Delaware or North Carolina, respectively, and needing to quarantine upon return.
Nevertheless, we adhered to the policy, including quarantining at the beginning of the year due to a previously planned vacation to the North Carolina beach, where the children were effectively still quarantined.
Among the reasons for deciding to go all virtual for the week following the Thanksgiving weekend was the concern that some families might travel and decide to simply not follow quarantine policies. That we have come to the point of our school assuming parents will lie to avoid the policy is telling of where we are as a society in 2021.
For the past five-plus years, we have had a now-former president who has baselessly accused the press of lying, the one institution we count on for the truth. That same president himself made 30,573 false or misleading statements during his four years of presidency, not even including statements made before or after as tracked by the Washington Post’s fact-checker team led by Glenn Kessler.
It is no wonder that President Trump endeavored so hard to discredit the press, whose responsibility it is to keep lies from public officials and corporations in check.
Efforts to hold Trump accountable for his greatest lie — that the election was stolen as an incitement to treason — fell short of the Senate votes needed for conviction. And this brings us to the reason why society has deteriorated to the point where telling lies without consequence has become normalized.
There are no consequences to telling the lie. FOX News’ ratings have blossomed with its nonjournalists feeding the American public a series of lies. The former president has seemingly escaped any punishment for his obvious misstatements and untruths, the euphemistic words the press likes to use since they cannot ultimately divine the president’s intent when he makes these statements. I think we can confidently call them lies.
It seems there is no longer any effort to actually challenge and mete out consequences for lies, but tacit acceptance that it will happen and how do we proceed around that one fact that does seem to be true for everyone. It is sad when the only truth is that we can expect others to lie, and it has now permeated to the levels of our children’s schools.
I think back to the True-False tests I took in elementary school. And later, further discernment of Fact vs. Opinion on other tests. Instead, our schools are now also the battlegrounds of what can be taught.
School boards are being assailed for promoting the instruction of diverse interpretations of our nation’s history rather than the sanitized versions that many of us learned 20 or more years ago.
For some, this might mean not teaching about the Japanese American incarceration during World War II as a mistake made by our government, but as a military necessity, despite all other facts indicating otherwise. Ultimately, it is most important for them that our country not be seen in a negative light.
Our schools are our greatest defense against this counterculture of lies. We need to promote their ability to teach the truth to our children and ensure they provide the tools for our children to discern fact from fiction.
We also need to return to accountability. There needs to be consequences for lying and doing wrong, whether it is the former president and the Big Lie about the election, or it is for parents sending their children to school in violation of quarantine policies.
We can’t continue to adjust society to accommodate the lies, or else the proliferation of lying will eventually tear apart the very fabric of our society.
Title Credit: Billy Joel’s song
“A Matter of Trust.”
David Inoue is executive director of the JACL. He is based in the organization’s Washington, D.C., office.
