Here it is Sunday, Easter 2020. Living with just your immediate family has its drawbacks. There are no buffers, no time-outs, no significant distance between family members other than different rooms in the house. During this era, we are discovering just how small our house actually is. I cannot fathom living in a studio apartment. Where would you go to escape one another? Literally, I am wishing for escape. I’ve wanted to escape even in pre-pandemic times. The urge to run away these days is rendered stronger for the fact that it cannot happen.
Too much togetherness is not a good thing. Too much unstructured time for teenagers is dangerous. There is too much opportunity for depression and anger. There is too much opportunity for the relative lack of things to occupy time to cause brains and creativity to atrophy. In the absence of having teachers and counselors pushing the kids, they do not yet know how to push themselves. And we parents are a poor substitute for those benevolent influences on the teenagers’ lives. Hell, I would venture to say we parents are making things worse for them.
Recently I was accused of doing nothing in the face of an insolent, rude adolescent. I beg of you, what is it that I can do? They are reacting to their environment. They are stuck in this house, with no respite in site, with people that they may not even like. When they look to their peers for validation, for support, and those peers aren’t there – well, they are going to be insolent, maybe even rude. What in the world am I going to do to change that? I am as lost on this as they are. Life is not normal, and is likely not going to return to normal. We will be post-pandemic at some point but our lives will forever be changed. There is not a damn thing we can do about that.
We can’t even escape.
Now, on to more ridiculous issues. There are elected officials that think Americans do not want to work. What the what?? What are these idiots smoking? These are the same people who don’t understand that making sure working people – ALL working people, not them – have money to spend means we have a functioning economy. Corporations don’t put money back into the economy. And to suggest that the 20-plus million people filing for unemployment in the last month actually WANT to do so is reprehensible, disgusting and should immediately disqualify those people who think this from serving in public office. They are completely out of touch with reality. Who am I talking about? Try this on for size, from Robert Reich:
The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, for example, says state unemployment offices are overwhelmed because the extra $600 is “incentivizing people to leave the workforce.” Hello?
Are you kidding me? I’ll bet his house has enough space for his family to escape from him. I’ll bet he doesn’t have to contend with frayed nerves and insolent adolescents. But these are also the same people who think that people’s lives are a reasonable price to pay for “opening up” the country.
In the meantime, though, we cope as best we can with the terms under which we hold our and our fellow humans’ lives dear. We stay home. We stay in the ever-shrinking abode and cope with our anger, frustration, fear and anguish with our eye on the day we are able to furtively venture out.
And perhaps even escape.