How is everyone getting along with self-isolation? It sounds easy. A great opportunity for a little “me time,” right? But it’s not the same. There is such hysteria in the air and I think we all need to follow the advise my son gave me as he drove me to the emergency room with my dislocated shoulder: “Go to your happy place.”
I have never known such pain as when my shoulder was out of the socket. It was all consuming and it didn’t let up. Every little bump in the road, every turn, acceleration of gas and stopping, made it all the worse. Breathing hurt, too. As we drove to the emergency room across town I must have been groaning, because my son told me to hang on, and go to my happy place. I closed my eyes, and pictured myself on the porch of our mountain cabin, a slight breeze caressing my cheek; breathing in the crisp clean air; watching the Osprey and the hummingbirds; gazing out at the lake. And you know, it helped. It got me to the hospital without throwing up or fainting.
Panic and physical pain are not the same, but I think we can come to grips with it in the same manner. When you take a step back, you know we as a society are really wigging out and not using a lot of common sense. There is no reason our stock market should be tanking because a flu is going around. Flues go around every year and, unfortunately, a lot of people die from them. Sure, this is a new flu, but it is still just the flu. There maybe some reason for concerns about respirator supplies, but not everywhere. If it’s a hospital in Seattle where a nursing home was hit by this new flu, then yes, respirator supplies are a top concern, but in my city, not so much. We don’t have a documented case in my county.
We need to calm down and quit hording toilet paper. We need to have confidence in our medical community and the economy needs to get back to growing, because over-reacting has never helped any crisis resolve itself. Seriously, we’ve been here before and we’ll be here again. Look at the stats from the H1N1 pandemic. Nothing closed then, the government didn’t close cities and force people to stay home. We didn’t get money from the government and we didn’t get to push back our tax filings. And we had all the toilet paper we could use.
I applaud efforts to lesson the spread of the outbreak. I would rather we were encouraged to do it as citizens and patriots rather than being pushed into a police state, but our hearts are in the right place, I think. But I don’t support the manic reporting on nothing but coronavirus that doesn’t serve to inform as much as it does to induce panic. I’m sure there are other things going on in the world and perhaps if we turned our focus for a little bit on something else, the panic and fear would subside.
We need to go to our happy places and keep our common sense in tact. Let’s look out for each other and help our neighbors – from appropriate distances, of course!
Robinson Write Now 