On July 23, the CDC released its statement “Preparing K-12 School Administrators for a Safe Return to School in Fall 2020.” I am a parent of school-aged children and a college writing teacher, and up to this point, I had been relying on written statements from the CDC to evaluate how safe it would be for me to return to work this fall, and for my children to return to school. Yet this statement concerns me.

First, the statement advocates for schools to reopen this fall, and that makes me nervous about the health and safety of these folks in this order: my children, their peers, my students, my children’s teachers, my colleagues, and myself. So part of my concern aligns with the statement’s purported concern for “health, safety and well-being of students, teachers, other school staff, their families, and communities.”

The other part of my concern, however, emerges from my own background as a writing teacher: the statement isn’t very well written. More specifically, elements of the statement are not formatted carefully or consistently, some cited sources don’t appear to be vetted or verified, and some of the information presented is questionably accurate.

These descriptors — careful, consistent, verified, precise, accurate — are important. They are the markers of the effective written presentation of good science. (I’d go so far as to say that they are the markers of good science, full stop.)

Without these markers, I must wonder about this statement: should I trust it? Can we trust the CDC anymore?

I think we can still trust the CDC, but we have to work hard to do so. Ronald Reagan was famous for popularizing the Russian proverb “trust, but verify.” This proverb won’t work for us, unfortunately; we can’t start with trust. Instead, the burden is on us to start with verification. Verify to trust.

Here’s what I mean: the CDC’s statement is a Frankenstein’s monster, an amalgamation of science-based recommendations from the CDC and politically-driven recommendations from the Trump administration. Fortunately, the elements that represent science-based recommendations are pretty clearly distinct from the elements that represent political wishes. The Trump administration isn’t very good at misinformation; not yet anyway. But as the days that seem like months and the months that seem like years go on, they might get better. And certainly, by highlighting some of the “mistakes” they made below, I’ll be inadvertently teaching the misinformers specific ways to improve their tactics.

More specifically, the marked difference in the formatting conventions, as well as the sharp drop-off in the quality of cited sources in the main sections strongly advocating for the reopening of schools were not authored by the same folks that authored the other sections. And given that two sections align with the political position of the Trump administration, coupled with the Trump administration’s pattern of intervening in CDC business, it’s fair to suggest that these two sections were likely authored by the Trump administration and motivated by political ends, rather than science or any real concern for my children’s safety or well-being.

Consider some contextual evidence: first, on July 7 President Trump insisted that public schools reopen in the Fall 2020, seemingly contradicting the at-the-time recommendations of the CDC that schools reopening “should be guided by what is feasible, practical, and acceptable and be tailored to the needs of each community.” This is President Trump’s motive: he wanted something the CDC thought was a bad idea.

Second, on July 13 President Trump directed hospitals to send data about Covid-19 cases directly to the Department of Health & Human Services, rather than to the CDC. This is evidence of President Trump’s intent to directly intervene in the CDC’s operations when he is motivated to do so.

Now take a look at the section headings in the July 23 statement. The statement features six sections, each with a variety of subsections. Of these six sections, two are differently formatted and sourced: “Critical Role of Schools” and “Why is it Important to Open Schools for In-Person Instruction?”

First, the nitpicky points: both of these two sections include several oddly capitalized words in the section headings (“Role,” “Schools,” “Important,” “Open,” “In-Person,” and “Instruction”). This is odd because these words are not proper nouns, and common nouns are not capitalized in any of the other section heading titles.

Not only that, but the same word “schools” is capitalized in both of these two sections, but not capitalized when used mid-heading in the third and sixth section heading. (“Schools” is capitalized in the fifth section heading, but only because it is the first word of that heading.)

This is the most obvious formatting distinction between these two section headings, but there are also some differences in terms of bolding, font size, and the use of bulleted lists worthy of consideration (but maybe only if you spend a large chunk of your time considering the formatting choices of written documents like I do).

When I see differences like these in a written document submitted in one of my classes, I typically chalk it up to carelessness. Carelessness comes in a variety of flavors when it comes to writing, from the run of the mill haste in rushing to print, to a more systemic and concerning indifference to precision. Because the statement is likely a document authored by more than one person, however, I’m pretty sure this flavor of carelessness came about because one (or more) authors wrote the two differently formatted sections, and a second (or more) author wrote the other sections.

Admittedly a differently formatted section heading title is not alarming to many folks other than those, like me, whose professional expertise includes training in being alarmed by things like differently formatted section headings.

What’s more concerning, though, is the difference in the quality and quantity of sources used to substantiate the differently formatted sections when compared to each of the other sections. In short, while these two sections use bad sources, the other four use good ones. Moreover, while the four sections that use good sources use a lot of them and use them frequently, the two that use bad sources don’t use a lot of them and they don’t use them often (maybe this is a good thing?)

For example, in the section entitled “What is known about the signs and symptoms, burden, and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among children?,” the authors include 26 citations, each of which pertains directly to the CDC’s own data, or to data generated by research studies the results of which have been published in 2020. All of the sources directly pertain to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Conversely, in the section entitled “Why is it Important to Open Schools for In-Person Instruction?,” the authors include just five citations, one of which is blogpost from EDNC, a North Carolina-based policy think tank and one of which is an article from McKinsey & Company, the same management consulting firm deeply involved in the collapse of Enron, the 2008 financial crisis, the implementation of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and the image recovery project of the Saudi Arabian regime following its murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

What to do? One suggestion: eliminate those two sections from our consideration entirely and focus on the other four sections.

Following the opening section, the statement would then include four sections, outlined as follows:

• What is known about the signs and symptoms, burden, and transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among children?
• What is known about how schools have reopened and the impact on SARS-CoV-2 transmission?
• Schools play a critical role in supporting the whole child, not just the academic achievement of students.
• How can K-12 schools prepare for going back to in-person instruction?

This is probably the statement the CDC put together for release prior to receiving the two drop-in sections. The report balances two truths: first, Covid-19 infects, hospitalizes, and kills children and reopening schools increases the incidences of infection, hospitalization, and death.

And second, schools are important for children’s development.

These two truths don’t contradict each other, but they do create a tension: is it possible to get the second in light of the first? Is it reasonable for schools to reopen and aid in children’s development if reopening schools will result in an increase in Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths of children and teachers in the communities in which those re-openings take place?

In light of these truths, the final section offers advice on the difficult, potentially impossible goal of working toward the second truth in light of the first. After all, face-to-face schooling is important for children’s development. The health and well-being of children, their teachers, families, and communities is more important; you can’t have the first without the second.

If you take out the two distracting sections, the statement becomes more careful and consistent in its written presentation, more precise and accurate in its sourcing. It regains a measure of trustworthiness. It no longer couches the very real fact that reopening schools in the fall will increase Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among children in a ill-formatted, under-sourced, and poorly justified claim that reopening schools is more important than the “health, safety and well-being of students, teachers, other school staff, their families, and communities.”

Indeed, without the two distracting sections, the statement doesn’t push for schools to reopen at all.

The tactics on display in this statement read very much like they were written by a low-level advisor in the Trump administration who thinks he’s smarter than he is. The misinformation tactics of the Trump administration will likely become far less clumsy and transparent. I can imagine, for example, that future reports or statements from the CDC or DOE might simply hyperlink to this statement, focusing more on the two drop-in sections authored by the Trump administration, than on the four sections authored by the CDC.

Regardless of whether the tactics get better, though, it’s important to keep in mind that vigilant and thoughtful analysis will always reveal them to be what they are: vacuous and unsubstantiated by reality. It might be the case that it is safer for kids to return to school than I am presently comfortable to admit. Even if not, it is certainly the case that regardless of whether or not it’s safe for them to return to school this fall, school remains an important element of children’s development and well-being.

The science of and around Covid-19 won’t necessarily always tell us what we want to hear, or it might tell us things that are at odds with each other. This is because science aims to be careful, precise, and accurate, rather than slapdash, grandiloquent, and partisan. And so when we consider recommendations purporting to be grounded in science, it’s necessary for us to verify the markers of carefulness, precision, and accuracy in those recommendations. It’s also important for us to remember that it’s very hard for hucksters to be careful, precise, and accurate.

I believe the riots and looting happening in Minneapolis in response to the police murder of George Floyd are a justified and right response. What follows are my reasons for maintaining this position. These reasons also relate to an adjacent position I hold about why some folks — mostly well-off white folks like me — might believe riots and lootings are not a justified and right response. As with any I hold, I am more than capable of being convinced to adjust and amend my position, reconsider the implications of my reasons, and question my assumptions. To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein, “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” The sharing, consideration of, and deliberation over these thoughts are the markers of good public discourse, and so I not only welcome them, I yearn for them.

Why Do Riots Happen?

I don’t mean “what are the big, systemic reasons related to inequality and inequity that cause riots?” I am not interested in attempting to unpack the truth in MLK’s perfect statement, “A riot is the language of the unheard” (though, more on that in a moment). No, in this section I’d like to consider the actual boots-on-the-ground chain of events that move a group of people from general unrest to rioting and looting. The sociologist Mark Granovetter has a nice examination of this that Malcolm Gladwell explains elegantly:

“[Riots are] started by people with a threshold of zero — instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that — and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.”

I like this explanation, as it provides a nice, tidy answer to the question of this section, one that I can’t help but be taken by given our current experiences with Covid-19. Riots happen as a kind of contagion, an impulse that starts with a patient zero and spreads quickly to receptive hosts. Yet it also begs a question: why does Patient Zero have such a low threshold? Now is the point to consider the systemic inequalities that have worn down the instigator’s tolerance.

Why Does the First Person to Throw a Rock through a Window Do So?

Reason 1:

The primary & historical purpose of police is to protect & serve property. There’s a much grimmer history here too, as in the 19th century some of the “property” police forces were conscripted with “protecting” were slaves, and the people these police were “protecting” slaves-as-property from were themselves. That is, a primary exigence for the formation of police forces in the 19th century was to ensure that slaves didn’t run away, considered an act of theft. (I am always astounded at the metaphysical gymnastics required to maintain the position that a slave-as-person could be tried as a person for stealing herself).

Reason 2:

Police murders of Folks like George Floyd were the end result of police’s attempt carry out this primary & historical purpose: to protect & serve property

• George Floyd matched the description of someone accused of writing a bad check (used to pay for groceries, property crime)
• Philandro Castile & Diamond Reynolds matched the description of a couple involved in a robbery (theft of stuff, property crime)
• Eric Garner was accused of selling single cigarettes without a tax stamp (property & tax crime)
• And, unfortunately, so on.

Reason 3:

When folks like Floyd, Castile, and Garner are murdered for allegedly threatening property, it highlights an incipient position in the modus operandi of the modern policing system: property is more valuable than people.

Reason 4:

The murders of Floyd, Castile, Garner, and many others, therefore, ought to be understood as a violent assertion of the position that property is more important than people.

Reason 5:

Riots & looting target property. The looting and destruction of a Target — the corporate HQ of which is in Minneapolis — ought to be understood as a violent response to this incipient position that property is more valuable than people. That is, riots are a violent demonstration of the inverse position that people are more important than property (just as the police murder of George Floyd is a violent demonstration of the position that property is more important than people.)

So, Why Are Riots Justified and Right?

Reasons 1–5 above, plus: because of course people are more valuable than property. (Imagine a police system established on this assumption, rather than its inverse (which is our reality).)

I understand this position — people are more valuable than property — is contestable, and I’m happy to consider and debate and discuss the position. And given my entrenchment in a system that — at least a little bit — values academic and public discourse, I have the privilege to consider and debate and discuss the relative value of people versus property from the safety and security of my home. I do not ever need to — nor do I have the desire to — confront the violent assertion of either side of this debate. That is, I do not need to confront a riot’s violent assertion that people are more important than property, nor do I have the need to confront a police murder’s violent assertion that property is more important than people.

Why I Think You Don’t Believe Riots Are Justified

Many of you share a social position comparably privileged to my own. You are plugged into an institution, and you value how its workings benefit you and your families. You are comfortably ensconced in a position in which your consideration of the debate over the relative value of property versus people has very little reality to it. It’s a thinking exercise, a potentially heated dinner conversation or — as this is — a social media or blog post you read with ⅔ attention. Where you fall on this debate has, probably, very little actual impact on your daily living. Except when it does.

Return to Granovetter’s analysis. The first rioter is firmly in the “people are more important than property” camp and that rioter has a threshold of zero, an intolerance for the inverse position that property is more important than people. This zero threshold, this intolerance, has been growing and building through a rich understanding of the history of policing in the US, as well as a lived experience where the inverse position that property is more important than people is consistently, constantly, and with frequent deadly results, forced upon them.

The first rioter to throw a rock is like a police officer. A police officer also has a zero threshold, an intolerance that ultimately pulls the trigger, administers the chokehold, or refuses to move a knee when implored to do so. Understood with the greatest degree of charity, the police officer’s intolerance to the position that people are more important than property is not cultivated through lived experience, but rather built up through regimented training. I think most folks believe people are more important than property, but police officers — as agents of the state — are inculcated to serve and protect property. And again, charitably, I imagine many police officers function in a constant state of grappling with these conflicting positions: people are more important than property, but I am trained to protect property as though it was more important than people. But in the moment of murdering a person alleged to have committed a crime against property, the police officer’s training overpowers their prior beliefs. The act of murder is, as I’ve said, an assertion that property is more important than a person. (Unless, as RATM suggests, “some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses.” There is certainly clear historical precedence in this statement, and if this is true for Derek Chauvin, Jeronimo Yanez, or Daniel Pantaleo and Justin Damico, all my charity here can be dismissed.)

You and me? We have thresholds of, say, 500 for both positions. That is, we might believe that people are more important than property, but we aren’t going to violently assert that position through rioting, just as we would not violently assert the position that property is more important than people by killing a person. But maybe it’s more granular than that. Maybe some of us have a slightly lower threshold of tolerance for one or the other positions. And this likely comes from the nature of our entrenchment, it’s makeup and constitution.

Me, I read and study Black Literature (and I will be doing so next Spring). I teach and have taught a lot of black and brown students. The makeup and constitution of my privileged entrenchment certainly generates in me a much stronger intolerance of the position that property is more important than people than the makeup and constitution of your privileged position might. You might feel closer to your stuff than you do other people, and so you might think that attacks on stuff are not a justified or right response to the murder of a person.

But I don’t know. And as I said at the top, I’m open to listening and in attempting to understand, mostly because I am afforded that opportunity to listen and attempt to understand. Remember, though: George Floyd wasn’t afforded that opportunity.

But these things happened on the same day, and I have to confront each event, as well as their simultaneity for two reasons: in regards to the Vegas shootings, I am a human. And in regard’s to Petty’s death, I am a huge Tom Petty fan.

Let’s start there: I am thankful for Tom Petty and his music. Full Moon Fever and Wildflowers are #1 and #2 on my all-time favorite albums list (the She’s the One soundtrack is#5). When I sang to my oldest son every night before I put him to sleep, it was “Alright for Now” and “Crawling Back to You.” Now, when I sing to my youngest every night before I put him to sleep, it’s “Wildflowers” and “Angel Dream.” Next to my father — a folk musician who also died at 66 — Tom Petty was and will remain the second most important musician of my life.

Petty’s songs were never part of the “soundtrack” to my life, but I always admired the way they very obviously could be part of the soundtracks for many others’ lives. Certainly, I have memories about listening to his music, but they are vague and fairly banal memories. This is fitting, in a way, because one of the primary reasons why I love Tom Petty is his attention to vague and fairly banal events and concepts. Certainly, his oeuvre is full of love songs and fight songs and plenty of driving songs; songs like “Runnin’ Down a Dream” and “Last Dance with Mary Jane” and “You Wreck Me” and “Refugee” and “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Songs that are solid. Songs that serve as evidence of his longevity and (relative) relevance.

Yet, for me, his best songs are those that sing of quieter, more boring moments. “Big Weekend,” for example, a song from his 2006 album Highway Companion. Coming nearly 30 years into his career, one would expect the “big weekend” Petty to be singing about here to be one of lavishness and opulence; he was, after all, rock and roll royalty at this point, having been inducted into the Hall of Fame four years earlier.

Yet, “Big Weekend” is a story about a guy, kind of a loser, who is on the road and passing through a town where some friends of his live “in a brick house/painted white and brown.” The guy cleans up his hotel room, and excitedly hits the road so he can hook up with his friends later “and go hit the bars.”

As a guy, kind of a loser, finishing up college in 2006, “Big Weekend” became my anthem when I would drive to visit all my college buddies that I missed after graduation. As I excitedly looked forward to hitting the bars, I guess I kind of glossed over the final lines of the song: “There’s times when I’m down/ And nothing’s to blame.” No, I needed a “big weekend/Kick up the dust…if you don’t run, you rust.”

I think this loser-y, everyman quality that is the foundation of so many of Petty’s songs is the very thing that sustained his 40 year career. He appealed to losers — like me — who probably thought they got a bum wrap in life, thought that they were owed something or that most of their problems were brought about by something or someone other than their own mediocrity. His music didn’t invent this sentiment, but the pervasiveness of the sentiment — and the ubiquity of folks who felt it — nurtured his music.

Recently, I’ve been struggling to come to terms with this aspect of Petty’s music. I’ve started to shudder at some of the more obvious and ham-handed appeals to some of his audience bases. I can look back at the thinly veiled pro-Confederate sentiments of “Southern Accents” and “Rebels” as being of a moment in Petty’s career in which his musical inclinations were pulled in equal parts between California and Florida, between the folksy and experimental sensibilities of the Byrds and the good ol’ boy Appalachia of Lynard Skynard. I can even forgive Petty’s obnoxious pander to pro-America vengeful patriotism when he played “Won’t Back Down” for the 9/11 memorial album America: A Tribute to Heroes, even though other Heartland rockers such as Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young opted for mournful and reflective pieces about love and loss.

But “Forgotten Man” from 2014’s Hypnotic Eye? Ostensibly a song about love lost, “Forgotten Man” was the song that triggered my suspicion of Tom Petty. I guess I sort of realized then that Petty was an artist still making radio-ready tunes 35 years into his career, so I know I certainly couldn’t have been the only one listening to him. He had a larger audience. And much of this larger audience had been listening to his songs very differently than I had been. This was part of Petty’s brilliance; one song for many listeners.

And this is why I worry that Stephen Paddock was a Tom Petty fan. Because the same stupid sentiment of feeling put upon, of feeling down and out with everyone and everything to blame but yourself, of feeling like it’s appropriate to hold a 150 year grudge over a wrongly fought and rightly lost war, of feeling like righteous and vengeful anger at an ill-defined enemy is more appropriate than compassion for victims, of looking out for “even the losers,” that same sentiment that nurtured Tom Petty’s longevity, and which he nurtured in and through his music, maybe that’s the same sentiment that nurtured Stephen Paddock. Maybe Paddock — like so many other mass murdering white men — thought himself forgotten, overlooked, underappreciated, and deserving.

I hope not, I really do. Because now’s a time when I’m down, and I really hope Tom Petty’s not to blame.