I’ve commented from time to time about a comment Erich Fromm made that many people–he probably meant many “bourgeoisie”–would suffer nervous breakdowns if their daily paper were interrupted for an extended period.
Now, this whole thing has no doubt nothing but increase our emotional dependence on technology, but even so, we all need daily routines. We need them for mental health. This is, I think, psychologically very clear.
Work and school are where we see our friends who are not our “coming over and hanging out in the kitchen” friends. And most Americans, any more, don’t have many of the latter any more, seemingly, anyway. This comedian is right on the money. I remember this too.
So work is where we see people we know. It’s where the feeling of isolation–enabled by the wealth that enables the space and the divorces and the family all over the country and world–is reduced.
And school of course for kids is where they see their friends, joke around in the back of class, share lunch together, run around in gym class or recess.
We need these things. Not having them is stressful, and stress kills.
And what about the grandparents? In the BEST of times many of them are isolated. Their kids don’t visit them often enough. They don’t see their grandkids remotely as often as they would like.
How do you think things are now? I have to believe a large percentage–I am going to SWAG half–would EAGERLY risk death to get hugs from their little people, without a moments hesitation.
But they can’t. Their governors won’t let them. In many States, like California, they won’t hardly let them do anything.
This breeds despair, and despair breeds ill health, and ill health makes everyone more likely to die from COVID–and for that matter, literally everything else.
There is no 100% safe path forward. This is the core reality, and perhaps this is the best way for Trump to frame it. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SAFETY IS NOT POSSIBLE.
But the costs of the lockdown are rising, while the deaths from the disease are falling. Surely if there is an inflection point, a time for change, it is NOW.
What Trump needs, I think, is an honest inventory of the costs: the job losses, the suicides, the foreclosures, the evictions, the drug overdoses, the reports of clinical depression in adults and particularly in children, reports on the immunosuppressive effects of stress and isolation and uncertainty, and say something like “look, I can’t promise you that nobody will die in a general reopening. But I can promise you that people are dying NOW from the shutdown. You have death on the one hand and death on the other. It’s ugly. It’s awful. It’s not unprecedented, but it’s been a long, long time. But on one hand you have both death and the dignity and relief of freedom, and on the other you have death and the inhuman demand that people die alone. We Americans are not cowards. We were not bred to cowardice, and cowardice is not our destiny. We need to move boldly to reopen, and do so quickly, and knowing that there may be some casualties, but knowing that NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, those numbers will keep adding up until we get through this thing. This thing cannot be avoided, and it should no longer be postponed. We know a lot about this thing now, including great methods of treatment, and we need to get our economy restarted. We owe it to our children, and we owe it to ourselves.”
And as I keep saying, I really, really think the suicide number–especially if combined with the drug overdose number–will be higher in the past 4 months than the COVID numbers were. I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong, but that this thing has pushed a lot of people over the edge seems obvious. They lost their jobs, their ability to socialize, and were subjected to relentless daily fear and uncertainty that, as some have argued, was tantamount to psychological torture. What do you think that did to people who were already wondering daily if it was all worth it? As I’ve pointed out, something like 25 million Americans before this thing were depressive, if not actively depressed.
I may have made that number up, but it was a lot. You figure out actual suicides and drug overdoses, then figure out how many attempts were made per actual suicide and how many survived drug overdoses there were (most cops carry the overdose drug everywhere, as do many nurses, I hear, since they have become so common); then you have how many people have thought about suicide, which is about ten times that number. Then you have how many people are depressive and at risk of suicidal thoughts. The end result is large. I’ve done it before and don’t have time to do it again.
I will comment with regard to me, I have some tough days. The particular path I have chosen is steep and hard. Listening to “Magic and Mystery in Tibet” was therapeutic for me, because it helped me reframe what is humanly possible.
But I am slowly healing. The knot–the big one–is slowly untangling. That was the thing that made it virtually necessary that I get drunk every so often, and usually at least once a week. Opening that knot has created a lot of pain, but it is useful pain, and I can now see it as temporary. It is moving, flowing, and that means eventual cessation.