Sorry. We decided there were too many children.
You know how it goes.
Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks. They do this over and over again.
And the state of Florida, understandably, said: Enough. This needs to stop. We have decided that there are too many children, and we can let some of them go. Or, as the state’s surgeon general put it when he eliminated all vaccine mandates yesterday: “Who am I as a government or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body? I don’t have that right.”
(That relaxed attitude about bodily autonomy comes as something of a surprise, given the state’s six-week abortion ban, but this is America, where you can do anything with your body unless there’s a uterus in it.)
Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow. If we lose herd immunity, we will bring back diseases that had formerly been eliminated, and some children who would otherwise have been protected will perish. But no price is too high to pay in this pointless war against decades of lifesaving science. Confusingly, this effort is being taken up at the same time that people are Very Concerned about dropping birth rates, but it makes sense when you understand that they don’t like the children we currently have. They want us to make other ones, instead.
This is certainly one possible response to the epidemic of mass shootings: unleash another epidemic on our elementary schools. If I had to guess what kind of shot we would make sure schoolchildren got, I would have guessed wrong. I am always guessing wrong. I am always guessing that we want children to live.
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