Our schools are both warehouses for young people, so that their parents can work, and training grounds so that they can be prepared to work themselves. If the schools are closed, their parents can't work.

That causes an enormous ripple effect. If some people can't work, then they don't have money, causing other people to lose their own jobs. That cascades through the system, tearing down not just the economy, but the American sense of self. If we're not at work, who are we?

The US sees itself as the hardest-working, most virtuous nation in the world. God literally "shed his grace" on us. We deserve to be the richest because we're the best. Closing the schools not only shuts down our vaunted advantage, but admits that we can be beaten. We imagine ourselves able to solve crises through hard work and superior intellect, and if we can't, we are failures.

At this point, it has become a matter of self-division as well. We've divided ourselves along lines that aren't even really ideological any more. The right wing has defined itself as opposed to "leftists", so anything the left proposes must be bad. If they want to wear masks and close down schools, then we will ban masks and open schools. It didn't even pass through a cost-benefit calculation, or at best one defined retroactively to justify the conclusion.

Looked at this way, it seems pretty inevitable that opening the schools was going to happen, at least in places like Georgia that fall on the one side of that divide I mentioned.