The Other “Cancel Culture”

There won’t be a Kansas State Fair this year, for the first time since 1916, another cancellation caused by the coronavirus epidemic. Fair officials had decided to take the public health risk and go ahead with annual festival of deep-fried food and 4-H exhibitions and farm implement sales and other Americana, but after Texas and Oklahoma and Nebraska cancelled their fairs about half of the food vendors and carnival ride companies that work the circuit decided it wouldn’t be profitable, which led to the cancellation.

The Kansas State Fair traditional happens in early September, when Kansas schools are traditionally in session, and there’s a big debate about whether that should happen this year. Gov. Laura Kelly has called for a delay in opening schools, but that’s ultimately up to the Kansas State Board of Education, which has scheduled meetings about it, and might go either way.

Coronavirus cases are on the rise in Kansas and unlikely to magically disappear by September, despite President Donald Trump’s fondest wishes, but there will nonetheless be a lot of political pressure to reopen the schools. Kansas is still a Republican state, although less so than it was five years ago, and Republicans everywhere are mostly eager to get back to normal no matter how abnormal the circumstances.

There’s an argument that K-12 students are at low risk of being infected and more likely to survive if they do, but low risk isn’t the same as no risk and most of the students’ parents and teachers are at greater risk. The students finished the last school year at home and online, and there’s no reason they can’t start the next year the same way, and although it’s no ideal there’s no chance of catching the coronavirus over the internet. Presumably the Kansas Board of Education will take that into consideration.

In any case of a lot of Kansas parents will send their children back to school when they think it’s safe, and we hope their children aren’t penalized for it. We’re as eager as anyone to get life back to normal, but the way things are going it’s best not to be overeager.

— Bud Norman

Labor Day and its Laborious Aftermath

Labor Day is the most bittersweet holiday. It affords a welcome day of rest from the labor that it honors, but unofficially marks when the carefree days of summer give way to the seriousness of autumn and winter. As much as we enjoy the bratwurst and beer and the day of rest, we still feel the annual resentment of the Huckleberry Finn freedom of summer vacation coming to an end with our forced return some stern schoolmarm’s classroom, along with all the adult responsibilities that are supposed to kick back in with the cooler temperatures, and this being a leap year we’re also obliged by a quadrennial political cliche to start paying even more attention to that dispiriting presidential race.

Here in Kansas, at least, we don’t acknowledge Labor Day as the actual end of summer. The kids have already been back in school for a couple of weeks, a form of child abuse we were happily spared back in our school days, those slowing-to-a-crawl school zone speed limits are back in effect along with all the rest of the adult responsibilities that never did really go away, and politics is a constant obsession even in off-years, so some arbitrary date on a calendar doesn’t mean much around here. The warm weather usually persists at least the first few weeks into September, sometimes even into October, until the big bluegrass festival down in Winfield and the Kansas State Fair over in Hutchinson have concluded no one around here will call it a summer, and we’ll keep wearing a straw fedora until the temperatures require a cloth cap, no matter what rules of hat etiquette they might have cooked up in the frigid northeast.

We’ll take today off, too, and enjoy family and friends and good food and the absence of labor, along with the strangely perfect weather we’ve been lately been having around here, and we suggest you do the same. Tomorrow is another work and school day, and there’s that dispiriting presidential election lurking in the day’s news, and it would be good to face it well rested.

— Bud Norman