IT’S the NOT KNOWING that sucks!
When will it go away? How will it go away? Who will drive it away?
Our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, nomads and wanderers who ventured and adventured out into the wild to fight or flee, feed their young and reproduce. When later generations became farmers, they settled down to live in a more or less permanent home. That home enabled them to acquire possessions, so then they invented the wheel allowing them more freedom to do more, produce and create more. Eventually the wheel became four wheels, first as a two-wheel cart and progressing into a bigger carriage that led to the invention of the modern car.
Being locked up within the four walls of our dwellings in the time of coronavirus/COVID-19 is against our nature, giving rise to boredom, feelings of extreme anxiety if not isolation and depression, even cabin fever. (Some people consider cabin fever an affective disorder.) Coronavirus fever and cabin fever, do they go together? Nobody knows when the epidemic will peak and flatten out, but if the President’s declaration of a state of calamity for six months is any indication –
Young people with raging hormones have been climbing the wall since the lockdown. Their elders sympathize, pointing out how lucky they are, look at those living without a wall or two in their house that is not a home (or a home that is not a house). Fortunately with our so-called legendary resiliency, the Filipino is responding to the worst of times with the best of humor, playfulness, jokes and laughter, and an altruistic attitude worthy of the noblest missionaries and bravest heroes. The quip of the week comes from Ted Failon, who chided his listeners, “Why are you mad at your mayors? They haven’t done a thing.”
The news is not getting any better, here and elsewhere. Only China, it seems, has no transmissions to report in the last several days (although there’s no telling if, once infected, a patient who has recovered won’t get it again). According to WHO, in the beginning it took 67 days to record 100,000 cases. The second 100,000 needed 11 days. Now the third 100,000 has happened in only four days.
Climbing walls is safer than jumping over them.
