We're Not Giddy Because We're Freakin' Exhausted
I guess you don't celebrate when a bear starts to ease up on mauling you
I kind of expected there to be balloons. It just seems like when there’s good news after long spells of bad news, there are often balloons. Maybe a confetti. Perhaps a band, ideally Parliament/Funkadelic. Seems like there ought to be streets blocked off and sunshine and kids in strollers and vendors selling weird/good food.
There’s nothing like that.
What am I talking about? Everything, kinda. The gestalt of events that affect our national health, both physical and mental, and the wave of better news developments therein. Specifically, the vaccines and the impending inauguration of President-Elect Biden. As I write this, I know the Pfizer vaccine is getting around, although slower than sensible people would like. I just now had to look up the status of the Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines (Moderna approved for emergency use, AZ on the way).
To almost everyone but Trump, the election is long since over and regardless of one’s political leanings, a more stable presence is soon to occupy the Oval Office. A person more interested in and capable of fighting covid is on the way. Things are about to be less dramatic every time you look at Twitter. We’re healing.
Healing doesn’t mean curing everything that’s wrong but it does mean moving in the right direction toward better health and we’re clearly doing that after a very long time of not. We’re healing. The numbers here in Minnesota are dropping since the latest round of restrictions from the governor’s office but we haven’t eradicated covid. Trump will leave office, possibly/ideally dragged from there, but he’s still spraying chaos into the world. Better times are on the way but they’re not here yet.
And when there is calm in the White House and the vaccines are widespread, I don’t think there will be celebrations. I think we’ll be too tired. We’ll have a world where a stranger’s breath won’t kill you and radical changes in foreign policy won’t be announced by 2am tweet and maybe that will feel better than a celebration. Maybe we can be calm. Remember calm? I don’t. But I’ve heard of it and it sounds nice.
But for Pete’s sake, let’s not have a parade too early like they did in 1918.
Philadelphia was the hardest-hit city in the United States. After the Liberty Loan parade (celebrations to promote government bonds that helped pay for the Allied cause in Europe) on September 28, thousands of people became infected. The city morgue, built to hold 36 bodies, was now faced with the arrival of hundreds within a few days. The entire city was quarantined and nearly 12,000 city residents died.
What changes are coming to your mind and the workplace in terms of mental health? Bryan Robinson writing in Forbes says four really good ones. For one, we won’t be going back to those offices in nearly the same numbers we left them. I’ve been calling that one for months because the pandemic has clearly shown us that overhead involved in office space is way too high to justify. I do think it’s a great change but for people who need a lot of other people around, I can see it being a really terrible thing.
Robinson goes on to say that employee mental health will be a big priority for employers, there will be a shift in healthy lifestyle changes, and there will be an emphasis on compassionate leadership in corporations. I don’t know about the lifestyle changes but I’ve become far too jaded to believe that companies will become more sensitive and compassionate if there are two dimes to be made by not doing that. Robinson has a lot of experts in his article to back up his assertions but *I* have my late-blooming Marxism.
This video made me laugh and laugh and also laugh. I can’t seem to embed it here so click. “An Ode to the Before Times”.
We all miss things that used to be normal — hugging friends, dancing in crowded places, not being terrified of standing near someone with a dry cough. But what about everything else that we took for granted? After nearly a year of social distancing, a new normal is starting to settle into place, and memories of how things used to be are only growing hazier. When we finally emerge on the other side of all this — hopefully with our sanity loosely intact — will we come to miss this strange year, too?
It gets very funny and weird. Stay with it.
Just a heads up...the email notifications for this post and your last didn’t come through
Also...your writing helps you. And it also helps people like me. Win-win, no shame in that :)