The Endless Perils of Living in a Swing State

The third grader and first grader who live in my house are still in virtual school, which has given them the opportunity, after spending their entire lives having their parents tell them they are not supposed to look at screens all day, to be legally required look at screens all day. At the end of another day of obvious failure to teach, over Zoom, the basic social skills a six-year-old needs to survive and thrive in the world, our family sat down to dinner and my eight-year-old announced that he had something to say to the table.

“Did you know that Jon Ossoff is going to raise taxes on the middle class?” he said, with the matter-of-factness of him telling us his shoe was untied. “Well, he is.” The depressing thing about this is not just that he said it. The depressing thing is that I, a person with an Ossoff for Senate sign in his front yard, immediately leapt to the defense of the Democratic Senatorial candidate here in Georgia. “That’s not true,” I said, instinctively, a reflex at this point. “He supports reinstating Glass-Steagall, but a family like ours is unlikely to see any substantial increase in — ” I stopped myself. My son, who was after all just parroting something he’d seen for 15 seconds every time he tried to watch a YouTube video, had already moved on to putting mashed potatoes in his younger brother’s ear. And I was a grown man debating politics with…