Musings the Day After Thanksgiving 2020
I’m sitting here on my couch with my two dogs as close to me as they can get with the stove going strong and a cold, grey fog hanging over the land outside my widow. Last night we broke the governor’s order and had 19 people to our Thanksgiving dinner. They were all family.
I hadn’t seen anyone from my family or had much human contact since the end of September when we celebrated my granddaughter’s birthday. Everyone seemed to shine, literally shine with an inner light that, for a moment or two I was able to see clearly. The time was special and served as a renewal of the bonds between us.
I was messaging an old friend, Lane, and told her of this and of an experience I have been having lately. Suddenly, I will feel a memory with all the sights, sounds and especially the smells. For an instant it will be as if I had broken the bonds of time and was actually there. Lane told me she had been feeling the same. I suggested that it might be because of our age since she and I are both in the elderly category. She said that could be the case but also it could be the separation we have been experiencing from these lockdowns, the lack of human companionship.
I believe Lane was more correct than I. The lockdowns, no matter what their effect on the virus, have had a devastating effect on our humanity and the way we relate. When, if we ever, are let out of this prison, it will be difficult to reestablish relations, awkward to say the least. Some of us, especially the youngsters who are particularly vulnerable to this isolation, will be damaged in a way for a long time if not for life. There will be a lot of work to do to get human bonds repaired.
I talk about the lockdowns the way I do because I am not at all convinced that they have had much positive effect on the spread of the disease. Perhaps, when the virus first appeared, if we had locked down the entire planet for a couple of weeks there would have been a more positive effect. But perhaps the virus would have been waiting outside our doors for us to emerge and the lockdown would have had little or no effect as our lockdown that did not get 100% participation. And I want to add here that I, unlike some others who insist on calling these antilock down, anti-mask people idiots, believe that a lot of confusion and disobedience would have been eliminated IF and only IF we had all believed the government and those outside of government who have been directing this response. I don’t blame these people for questioning or disobeying. We have been fed lie after lie and at some point, even the truth will not be believed when told by a liar.
Part of my personal struggle has been with friends. Some of them have intimated that I have joined the ranks of “conspiracy theorists.” Yes, I have said and posted some fairly radical stuff. Some of it was simply to see what reaction I got and some was because for one reason or another I thought an idea in the piece had merit. From my perspective, there is something other than the virus going on and I am getting close to the belief that COVID 19 was engineered to do just what it has done: sow confusion, remove a few retirees (useless eaters) from the overburdened retirement system, and consolidate both money and power in the hands of a few rather than the society as a whole. It’s not difficult for me to believe this as almost every single leader we have has told us lies at one time or another and many of them lie constantly but aren’t as stupid about it as Trump. I also realize that these people, despite different parties and different public political views, are all friends. They are also the ones who work for those who control almost all of the media, resources, money and power. So why the hell should we believe anything they might say? It has become obvious to even the most challenged observer that the same group has profited greatly from the pandemic and that the economic system they have told us is so great is about to implode. How can we trust these people when they have been involved in lies economic manipulation to their own benefit?
It has also occurred to me, as it apparently has not occurred to many of my countrymen, that the same people we are looking to for leadership are not only the liars mentioned above, but also the same who are either directly or indirectly implicated in policies that have led to enrichment of the upper class, poverty for the lower class, continuous war and the needless deaths of millions of people in a variety of ways including war and sanctions. We are looking to the murderer to solve the crime of murder as we are also looking to the thief to solve the crime of robbery. How is that working out?
Now I’ve seen a lot of conspiracy theories out there and some of them hold quite a bit of water. Some seem really far out and there is no reason to believe them at all. Lizard aliens merged with humans to control the planet, for instance. It gets difficult when one is lumped in with conspirists and when asked for sources, find the sources they had just accessed are no longer there. It is also infuriating to give someone a page of resources that prove your point and the other person says something like, “Let me know what you find in those links.” Some of us have gotten too lazy to do our own research.
The problem now is that we are all separated into our little boxes: economic status, conspiracy theorist, Democrat, Republican, black, brown, white, sexual orientation, etc. In addition, we are divided by loss of social contact, loss of exchange of ideas, and censorship (which is going wild). Last night showed me in a way no other word or deed could that we are suffering from lack of human contact and it is making us all insane. We are prevented from tossing around ideas, from feeling that warmth of another person hugging us, the conversation that couldn’t take place over the phone or internet and from seeing our own reflection in the people around us.
I am not suggesting throwing caution to the wind, but rather to temper our caution with knowledge and reasonableness that takes into account not only the risk of the virus, but the risk of continued social isolation. Alone, we are not strong. Alone, we are not sane. Alone, we cannot heal.