Diary 28

Wednesday, April 15th

Another marvelous Zoom call today with friends in England lifted my spirits and helped to give another perspective. One thing that emerged was that my friend who is a Montessori teacher for the kids of essential workers has noticed how the children are showing stress. Clearly, with both parents in high risk occupations these children are going to be surrounded by even more anxiety than the rest of us. Some are regressing (thumb sucking etc.) and some are becoming anxiously obsessive about hand washing, for example. The thing that struck my friend and her co-workers was that these children will grow up with the imprinting of these anxious times firmly embedded in their psyches. Like children who grew up in the Depression, or were evacuated in WW2, the scars may be deep.  And they will affect the children that they have, twenty years from now. We may be hungering for an end to our lockdown by next week (or whenever) but the current situation truly is one with long term consequences at a very personal level.

Healing our situation will, therefore, require much tact and much love from us all. I think I can rely on basic human goodness to supply that.

Meanwhile the numbers roll in: 2 million infected world-wide, 25,000 dead in the USA.  And yet even the numbers are in doubt. It seems that some agencies are not counting those who die in old age care facilities; others are not counting home deaths. And since there are no accurate testing kits we truly don’t know the size of the numbers. Those 2 million statistic, for example, represents only the confirmed cases, severe enough to be taken into hospitals. So it represents only the 20% who, according to the projections, will be hard hit.  This really isn’t math. This is guesswork from a government not remarkable for its veracity.

In other news, Trump delays the arrival of the relief checks because he wants his name printed on them. I doubt the electronic versions will show this, but still.  Why not have his portrait on them, too?