05-30-2020, 09:29 PM
The social isolation is difficult in the extreme. But even worse than loneliness is being stuck with bad company. Social distancing is no cure for mental illness; if anything it tends to intensify it. Alcoholics and addicts might find this a good time to clean up their acts -- but I question whether the time makes it any easier. Liquor stores may be doing a bigger business these days because inactivity and the absence of social lives. I would suspect that the liquor stores are doing a splendid business these days.
Then come the other swinish behaviors that might be more tolerable in a person that one does not see all the time but become insufferable if one is stuck with those behaviors all the time. That the consequences of abusive behavior get more severe does not deter the abuser.
Some of us thought that this would be the time in which to revive old hobbies, read the Great Books, do correspondence (an old practice that the telephone killed), and maybe binge-watch The Honeymooners, Star Trek, M*A*S*H, Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad -- or to listen to all of the symphonies, string quartets, or piano trios of Franz Josef Haydn. (Have any of us done that?)
This is a rough time. It is not safe to say that what doesn't kill us will make us stronger.
Then come the other swinish behaviors that might be more tolerable in a person that one does not see all the time but become insufferable if one is stuck with those behaviors all the time. That the consequences of abusive behavior get more severe does not deter the abuser.
Some of us thought that this would be the time in which to revive old hobbies, read the Great Books, do correspondence (an old practice that the telephone killed), and maybe binge-watch The Honeymooners, Star Trek, M*A*S*H, Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad -- or to listen to all of the symphonies, string quartets, or piano trios of Franz Josef Haydn. (Have any of us done that?)
This is a rough time. It is not safe to say that what doesn't kill us will make us stronger.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.