Home Incarceration Syndrome
These are strange and disconcerting times, as you may have noticed. And I’m not just talking about Ireland closing its bars before St. Patrick’s Day, something akin to the Catholic Church canceling Easter, both sacred events, holy of holy. The South End String Band had two, count em, two St. Pat’s Day gigs canceled which should qualify us for serious recompense when the Congress finally draws up its fiscal fix for the mayhem caused by the pandemic.
Fiscal fiddling is one thing, this being a full blown Recession in no time flat. The stock market boyz figured out the Administration is totally adrift, bouncing from advice to stay calm and continue going to work to an admission that this may be an epidemic that will be with us til the end of summer which sent the Market to an all-time drop on the Dow and the S&P. But what is more concerning to most of us as this quarantine drags on, confining Americans to their homes and their computers, is mental health. I’m talking, of course, about a pandemic of insanity. Men without sports, women with their husbands under foot, children barred from school and the usual escape from parental control.
In Spain, in Italy, the balconies of sequestered inmates sprout musicians playing for the neighbors, songs sung from high rise to high rise in a plaintive attempt to cheer one another up. Not gonna happen in the suburbs of Seattle or Baltimore. The other day the newspaper printed an article with a photo of a mom playing cello on the sidewalk with her son on drums. If that cheers you up, check with your health care provider. Next thing you know we’ll have the String Band out in the cul-de-sacs of the South End pounding out banjo tunes in the rain. You know, to cheer up the voluntarily incarcerated.
We’re in the initial phase of what is politely and inaccurately called Social Distancing. Hellfire, most of us have socially distanced since the invention of Facebook and the advent of the cellphone, nothing new there. But now that 90% of us are ordered to stay in our homes, the internet has overloaded and servers are crashing. It shouldn’t take much imagination to envision what mayhem will be unleashed when Netflix won’t stream, when Amazon shopping is curtailed, when apps are useless and when we’re left to, well, that imagination that’s been atrophied for years.
What is called for, what should be a national emergency, is an army of mental health professionals. Bad enough, this coronavirus, but millions of psychotic babbling neighbors trapped in a narrowing world with the attention span of mating rabbits? If your cellphone still works, call your representative, call your senator, call the governor … before it’s too late. Whatever you do, though, don’t call the White House. The stock market has taken enough hits lately, we don’t need a full blown Depression.
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Tags: Cabin Fever Pandemic, Netflix Overdose, South End Insane Asylum, Voluntary Incarceration Insanity