I don’t mind being at home every day, only going out to the bank, or to buy groceries and medicines as needed. I don’t have a problem with social distancing—I’m not much of a social being anyway. A whole world with all kinds of people inhabits my mind; they keep me entertained, and when they rest, I enter the world of books and visit new places, new characters, new times.
I don’t mind isolation either. Besides, how bad is isolation at home compared to being in a damp concrete cell, imprisoned for years, if not life, or trapped in a rat-infested tent in the Nazi death camps? Not so long ago, children were placed in a tent encampment under Trump’s new zero tolerance policy near the Mexican border. Who complained about that? Not as many as should have.
But I am so over reading about people dying, in terms of statistics, like in “14,687 confirmed deaths in the U.S. in contrast to the 3,333 fatalities in China,” and I am so over finding out about bodies of virus victims abandoned in nursing homes, or drive-thru funerals lasting less than five minutes.
This morning I saw a YouTube video of endless lines of coffins in a Barcelona parking garage. What have we become? Are we only numbers? Dead bodies in coffins waiting to be buried? We are humans no more, but consumers of fear in a world where the news media transform the horrific into the norm.