I’ve never been very much in favour of public displays of grief, flowers constantly replaced at the site of a fatal accident, the masses of flowers left in front of Buckingham Palace when Diana died, the flowers that filled Saint Ann’s Square after the bomb at the Ariana Grande concert and all that sort of thing. It always seems a little false to me, or maybe not actually false as such but the product of a kind of mass hysteria. It’s not that I don’t understand the sadness or sympathise with those close to the victims of such events but I don’t (can’t) weep copious tears for people I don’t know. Maybe my bump of sentimentality is not big enough.
However, if people want to do that sort of thing, if they want to have a mass vigil, go out on the streets to express their feelings, then that is their business. They should be able to do so. I have been rather surprised at the mass outpouring of fear by so many women. I never thought our streets were such dangerous places but I do agree that we need to take steps to ensure that women, and men for that matter, feel able to walk along the streets, at whatever time of day, without being afraid.
And I really don’t think that the response to the mass vigil in London was anything like appropriate. Did police really have to hold young women down on the ground to handcuff them? Surely there must be a better “standard procedure” than that. Added to this is the proposal to bring in laws restricting protests on our streets, including the most peaceful of protests. People need the right to protest. What are we supposed to do? Write a polite letter of protest?
No wonder we are all feeling anxious!
When I was a child it was always dinned into me that the policeman was “my friend” and if I was was in trouble I should look for a policeman. Now it begins to feel as though “my friend” might just as soon arrest me, probably with violence, rather than help me. Not a cheerful thought!
As we gradually move towards opening up our society again, I keep reading about people who are really anxious about the whole business. A minority of children didn’t want to go back to school ... because they felt they learnt better working away on their own and didn’t want to get back to busy, crowded classrooms. Some adults feel the same way about going back to the office.
Dr Tine Van Bortel, a senior research associate in public health at the University of Cambridge, said: “Lockdown has given people with mental health conditions like anxiety and PTSD permission to stay at home, and knowing that at some point you’ll have to go out again can actually trigger stress and anxiety.”
Rosie Weatherley, an information content manager at Mind, said: “Some of us might have found there were some unexpected plus points to lockdown – and therefore feel uneasy or anxious at the prospect of it being lifted. For example, we may be worried about ‘normality’ resuming, or not wanting to return to a faster pace with busier daily lives, and less downtime to ourselves.”
She said it was “really important” for government and employers to provide empathy and support for those who need it “beyond lockdown lifting”.
We were talking to our son yesterday. He thinks our society perhaps needs a rethink about how we organise our lives. He envisages most people working a possible 2 or 3 days in the office and the rest of the time from home. Instead of big city centres, he imagines smaller town centres in the more outer areas of our big cities. Of course, this doesn’t address the question of those who cannot work from home, just because of the nature of the work they do. The Spanish political party Más País would like to see a four-day week introduced for all. This would be a 32 hour week, even better than the French suggestion years ago of a 35 hour maximum working week. It would have to be without loss of pay, of course, but with the right kind of support it could go some way to solving unemployment problems.
Maybe we should regard the upheaval of the pandemic as a chance to rethink how we run our lives - less stress, less anxiety, more caring and consideration. Seize the opportunity! Perhaps not return to “normal” but create a new “normal”.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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