Dupage Policy Journal

AWAKE Illinois members are blasting state leaders over their handling of the COVID-I9 crisis and their decision to close schools across the state, a move the groups says was unnecessary.

“Schools should have opened August 2020,” the group recently posted on Twitter. “Illinois policymakers failed our kids… will they ever learn?”

As the scheduled start of another school year draws closer,  parents are taking a stance in hopes of preventing a repeat of last year.

Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy science teacher Dr. Peter Dong recently used his senior banquet address to recount how he thinks leaders fouled up in their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I want you to consider what happened last year and decide for yourself, did we as a society make the right choices?” Dong said in a video posted to YouTube. “You’re the ones affected by the decision so you need to think about it.”

Dong leaves no doubt about where he stands on the issue.

“There’s a phrase people keep using and it’s 'an abundance of caution,'” he said. “We have a word for that in the dictionary, and it’s called fear. What happened was the pandemic happened a long time ago and soon the fear became habitual. It sank into our psyche. It told us to be afraid of other people, to treat every other human being as a threat. The fear remains long after we’ve been vaccinated from the virus.”

Dong charges such thinking has now spread to other segments of society.

“Everything we see has been governed by fear,” he said. “You end up evolving to the most frightened common denominator. Whoever is the most terrified ends up determining what happens next. This just doesn’t happen when you’re getting together with your friends. It affects all policy making; it affects things at the CDC and it affects decisions about whether to reopen schools."

Dong reasons one thing has become crystal clear.

“Remote learning is terrible, and the teachers know it too,” he said. “It’s really hard to be motivated by a blank, talking screen. We can see the number of failures and at-risk students.”

Dong implored the students to remember the times and at some point be willing to take a stance.

“I want you to remember what happens to a society when it falls into a downward spiral of fear,” he said. “The reason I bring this all up is because this is not your last catastrophe. We have a national catastrophe every 20 or 30 years. You’re going to be the one in the driver’s seat with influence. When that happens, I want you to remember what happens when you allow fear to dominate your thinking.”