Yesterday, Canyon Creek students returned to school after missing nearly a week and a half due to the swine flu scare. You would think that by now, this would no longer be newsworthy, but sure enough news crews were there yesterday morning as I dropped my daughter off for school. As I walked back to my car, I was approached and they asked me a few questions. First of all, it is never a good idea to asks me anything before 8am or before I’ve had a cup of coffee. I answered the usual questions about whether I felt safe sending my child back to school (of course), whether it had been a hardship on my family (well, keeping three kids at home for a week isn’t really “hardship”, although my wife probably has a different opinion), and then the question I most wanted them to ask… do you think this entire thing was overblown or am I glad the schools took the appropriate action?
This is the question that really gets to me. Canyon Creek was closed because a student had the flu. In Fort Worth, eighty thousand kids were taken out of school for a week because of a single kid with the swine flu. Now, I don’t want to say that the school districts overreacted… had they done nothing and the flu had been more serious we would be outraged, but the bigger concern is just how worried we became about something we didn’t fully understand.
So how did I answer the question? “While I don’t think the action was all that necessary in retrospect, my bigger concern was why this is so newsworthy. Three thousand kids die EVERY DAY from Malaria in Africa alone, malnutrition is the cause of over half of the deaths of children worldwide… in fact 34,000 children die from malnutrition EVERY DAY (which is about the number that the flu kills every YEAR).
So is it wrong for us to be concerned about the welfare of our kids? Certainly not. But is it newsworthy while thousands die daily and don’t have a voice? I don’t think so.
Imagine that… the quote about being glad my kids were back in school made the news. The quote about the plight of kids around the world? Not so much.
