How The Left Has Poisoned What It Means To Be Healthy, And Why It Matters

In a little public school on Capitol Hill, kindergartners are banned the campus nearly every single week. School policy on the matter is simple: If a child in a class tests positive for Covid, every unvaccinated child in that child’s class must quarantine at home for 10 days — or return “early” if their parents produce a negative test on the morning of the sixth day.

With less than one-third of children aged 11 and younger vaccinated, the policy casts a wide net. And with Centers for Disease Control information showing Covid infections currently higher among vaccinated children than unvaccinated children, those children allowed by the policy to remain in school provide a rolling drumbeat of asymptomatic classroom positives.

The result? Mass de facto suspensions rolling through grades, with children across the city missing five, 10, or more days of school this spring already. Quarantine letters are sent home sometimes multiple times a week. Working and single parents count themselves lucky if their child was already kicked out of class the day the next positive pops.

These policies aren’t confined to Washington, D.C., either. In leftist school districts across the country, the same draconian rules keep children already robbed of years of education and social interaction from ever hoping to catch up.

Amazingly, the Centers for Disease Control supports these policies. In fact, they wrote them. Why? All in the name of keeping children “healthy” (or, rather, the teachers who demanded them happy).

Today, the CDC recommends keeping kids masked and away from their peers because of a disease that doesn’t threaten them. Indeed, one of the earliest things we learned — more than two years ago — is the disease doesn’t threaten children. Still, the CDC and its adherents keep kids under tighter lockdowns than adults anywhere in the country hold themselves to. All in the name of health.

So what does the word “healthy” even mean today? Increasingly, it means whatever those in power want it to. Take a look at this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition:

The image is supposed to be bold; to generate conversation. How? A catalog traditionally dedicated to celebrating extremely fit women is instead celebrating an obese woman; is instead promoting what the woke left claims is a “healthier” body image.

Celebrating “plus-sized” models is all the rage these days. Companies that don’t get in on the fad are themselves shamed for having “fat shamed” — a term to used keep our increasingly unhealthy citizenry comfortable in their own unhealthiness.

Regardless of whether you think “fat is beautiful,” it’s not healthy. The “brave” discussion Sports Illustrated generated isn’t about that, though. While plenty of writers and reporters were eager to condemn philosopher Jordan Peterson’s misdirected criticism of the model, far fewer were eager to mention the deadly side effects of gross obesity; among them, diabetes, heart disease and — interestingly enough — the dreaded Covid.

For years now we’ve known that, far from “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Covid is rather a pandemic of the fat, who have suffered far higher fatality rates per infection.

But even while fear of Covid keeps our kids out of school for sometimes years at a time to protect “their health,” those same health concerns are quickly ejected in the name of what progressives recharacterize as “body positivity.” The word “healthy” doesn’t enter the media conversation, except to hang its wreath on the “body image” debate.

It’s strange, but old rules don’t apply when words are deployed in the service of the woke left.

“Sexual health,” for example, is used to justify all sorts of perversions in the classroom.

“Mental health” is used to justify feeding hormone suppressants to vulnerable children.

“Reproductive health” is used to justify abortion.

The list goes on, and “health” is just one among many other words (“science,” “gender,” “disinformation,” “protest,” etc.) so casually twisted in the service of the woke left.

The modern American left has made great use of this tactic: taking broadly accepted words and norms, then twisting them to mean a very different thing from what they once meant. It’s a current tactic for sure, but it’s hardly a new one. The word heresy has long been used to describe a fatally incorrect interpretation of religion, but the word itself comes to us from the ancient Greek word, “hairesis” — meaning “to take, or choose.”

What made the old heresies so alluring to the unsuspecting faithful is that they didn’t simply expunge whole ideas — or even whole-cloth invent new ones. Rather, they took, or chose, certain ideas or beliefs from their hosts, elevating or subverting them in such a way as to subtly — but substantively — change the original philosophy into something sneakily different: into a heresy.

Children’s social and intellectual health, for example, have been sacrificed on the altar of teacher’s paranoia.

Americans’ physical health has been sacrificed to alleged emotional health.

School kids’ mental health and moral wellbeing have been sacrificed to adults’ perversions.

Teenagers’ futures have been sacrificed to gender ideology.

The lives of children have been sacrificed to the independence of their mothers.

Again and again, one aspect of human life is taken, or chosen, for aggrandizement or debasement to the detriment of the whole truth.

It’s an old trick, and a dangerous one, but the cure has remained the same. The woke left is intent to wield words as weapons, using our own good things against us. Don’t buy it; don’t adopts the definitions, or use the phrases they demand.

The cure to heresy is now as it was then: simple truth. Don’t be afraid to use it; it will serve you well.

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