The bizarre ritual that proves state and school officials aren't serious about stopping COVID.

At my local high school, there's a bizarre "game." Students get all sweaty, even bloody, and then jumped into huge piles on top of each other, like a giant, violent mosh pit. Such an absurd flaunting of social distancing in the most outrageous way dwarfs the Tides laundry Pods challenge in its stupidity. Yet local administrators have actually even encouraged the game. Even when schools were otherwise shut down altogether, this bizarre ritual persisted.

There are historical precedents for it. And no, when I say "it's not gay at all," I'm not coyly calling it gay. Seriously, it's not gay at all. But when kids are learning absolutely nothing because they're in empty (or at least adult-free) houses staring at computer monitors all day... how is it that this ritual persisted?

Of all the sports, it's the dumbest in the age of COVID. If I was acting out of disdain for high school sports, I'd pick on soccer, but soccer players don't even touch the ball. (Baseball is my personal favorite, so I might even joke about baseball players wear gloves to touch the ball.)

In my wife's school, the two covid outbreaks came from the wrestling team and the football team. Duh.

Now, I'm not by ad-hominem attacking any particular method at preventing transmission. I'm a big fan of staying six feet apart and working from home when possible. Take-out? Yes. Virtual conferences? Yes. Delayed interstate vacations? Yes. Vaccines? Well, the protein-spike "vaccines" make me nervous, but OK... I got the J&J when I found out I had NOT had the disease previously. DON'T TAKE THE PROTEIN-SPIKE VACCINES, ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAVE ALREADY HAD THE VIRUS. Children wearing masks in schools, despite the lack of scientific evidence that it's safe for developing brains? Now, I'm mad.

But football in schools says nothing about how effective these are. All it says is that the officials who have shut down are schools, destroyed millions of people's life savings, doomed tens of millions of people in developing economies to starvation and misery, etc., did so out of the mere politics of fear, not trying to stop the spread of the virus.

No-one's going to go broke from banning high-school football. Inner-city black kids aren't even going to lose scholarships in the balance. At worst, colleges will be less informed as they decide who to give them to, and you might end up seeing a first-round draft pick out of Whattsamatta U.

But parents will be angry. Isn't it obscene that THIS is where America draws the line? Kill grandma, leave little Jimmy home alone and uneducated, bankrupt the local diner, but don't you dare cancel high school football games?

At my local high school, there’s a bizarre “game.” Students get all sweaty, even bloody, and then jumped into huge piles on top of each other, like a giant, violent mosh pit. Such an absurd flaunting of social distancing in the most outrageous way dwarfs the Tides laundry Pods challenge in its stupidity. Yet local administrators have actually even encouraged the game. Even when schools were otherwise shut down altogether, this bizarre ritual persisted.

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And that’s exactly what kids need to do. Roll around on the ground and eat some dirt, run into each other, get sweaty and pile up, the kind of thing kids have done since a few hundred years before I was born.

Just how do you think herd immunity happens?

This is why kids of my generation were not as highly susceptible to things like the allergies we see today, we were not “protected” from the world around us. We rolled around in it. We got cut or scraped, wiped it off with our grubby hands, and kept on playing, or at the very most, slapped a band aid on it with our barely washed hands, and went back out to play.

Usually my band aids came off soon as the bleeding stopped, and I generally refused to put another one in its place as long as it had stopped bleeding.

I’ve never had any allergies, I’m not even allergic to poison ivy, I can still pull it up out of the ground without gloves on. I try to grab gloves these days, or at least wash my hands afterward...I don’t push my luck, I don’t eat it or stand in the smoke if I burn it...

This is what kids need to do, they’re just following their instincts to roll around in the dirt and expose themselves to the bacteria and so forth that allows them to develop their “herd immunity”...

I want to see every kid 3 years old and up doing exactly the same thing. Exactly as we have done since before this continent was “discovered”...

Let ‘em play.

I have no use for football, never did, but if kids want to play football, get sweaty and pile up, let ‘em. It hasn’t hurt us since the day football was invented, why should it now?

Yes, it sems you’re right...even though I absolutely hate dogs of all descriptions. Ugly, smelly, horrible table manners, bark and keep me awake all night, “land mines” in my yard right now even though I haven’t had a dog in over 30 years...

Neighbor’s trash can dumped out and scattered all over his porch 2 or 3 times a week until he finally tied a rat trap to it and baited it with an inch long piece of a hot dog...He woke up to a loud HOWL that night, his trash can was never touched again...till another neighbor decided to let a dog run loose about 2 years later. That one has killed at least a half dozen of another neighbor’s chickens a half mile up the road, he followed the dog home and told them if he saw the dog in his yard one more time he’d shoot the thing.

I’ve watched both of the aforementioned dogs lay in my back yard and shred plastic bags they dug out of neighbors’ trash cans, I run them off and they just do it again a couple of days later. I’ve picked up the remains of the plastic bags they shredded a couple of dozen times. Fortunately I think both are dead now.

The neighbors refuse to keep their dogs in their own yards, where they actually belong. Even after they are told that their dogs keep waking me up at 3 am barking right outside my window, scattering trash, shredding plastic bags that I have to pick up, leaving piles in my yard for me to step in...

And I still don’t have any objection to others giving their kids a dog, but they really do need to teach their kids to keep their dogs in their own yard where they belong. If you want to keep a dog, especially a big one, put up a fence and keep the damn thing in YOUR yard, because he WILL run next door to use MY yard for his bathroom. Every time without fail, I have never seen a dog that will use his own yard for a bathroom unless forced to by a fence.

I have never seen one that will not dump out my garbage can and scatter it unless forced to leave it alone by my slingshot or a rat trap. I have never seen a dog that will not run around all night with a group of other dogs - they are pack animals - and bark outside my window at 2 to 4 am, waking me up. One group years ago would chase our 2 cats up a tree and sit there and bark at them. Usually around 2 or 3AM. Not fun when I had to be up at 5:30 to get ready to go to work...my cats never barked and woke anybody up...

Yes, I made a good case for giving kids a dog, but you need to teach them how to be RESPONSIBLE dog owners too, which people no longer do.

Our laws desperately need to be changed too. I’ve had to deal with a couple of large, aggressive dogs out here and the sheriff’s deputies told me I can’t shoot one, I can get in more trouble than if I shoot the owner.

100 years ago the laws may have been ok, when your nearest neighbor was 2 miles away and you’d never see his mean dog. Now, when I can throw a rock and hit my nearest neihbor’s house, his dog uses my yard for a bathrooom, I step in it, and I have no legal recourse. His dog can literally try to attack me and I have no legal options until the dog actually leaves marks and I can prove I was attacked.

That happened for 3 or 4 years, a full grown black lab tried to attack me every time I walked out my door, assuming he saw me. I had to carry my walking cane to protect myself, because I had been told by a sheriff’s deputy I could not just shoot the attacking dog. I beat the crap out of that dog with the walking cane at least 25 times, a month or so later he’d try it again.

I appartently started it by chasing the dog out of my garden when I caught him pissing on my freshly transplanted tomato plants, transplante the night before, 2 inches tall... He peed on 3 and killed them, stomped on 4 and killed them. The dog was about 4 mpnths old, I had never seen it before, didn’t know the neighbor had gotten a dog. Suddenly it’s pissing on my tomato plants at 6AM. And hated me forever, and tried to attack me every time he saw me for the rest of his life, or at least until I moved away.

We have other neighbors who insist on letting their large dogs run loose, they apparently have no consideration for anyone else at all, their dogs are a nuisance. Try to tell them that, they refuse to admit their sweet little puppy would bother anyone...no I’m not kidding.

And how many people have had to have expensive repairs done on their cars because someone let their dog run loose on a highway where cars are running 70mph? Then claim oh no, that’s not my dog...so you’re stuck paying for the repairs to to your own car that is actually someone else’s fault. Why would anyone live on a highway like the one I drive on every day and let their dog run loose to begin with, after all the thousands of dogs I’ve seen dead on the roads all over America? My father had to shell out several hundred dollars to fix his car about 1975 while I was in the military, ran over someone’s dog late at night going 70mph in a Toyota...Nope, not my dog, never seen it before...

Yeah give your kids a dog...but put in a fence and teach them to be responsible about it. Keep it and its piles in YOUR yard not mine.

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