What is Becoming of Us?

 

A now significant majority of people don't reply at all when I pass them by in the park, on Main Street, wherever, and I say 'hello' from behind my mask. They avert their eyes (and often their entire faces), re-secure their masks, and hurry their steps. The fear that pervades now that the puff of air that carries my greeting brings fatal risk has become for so many life-altering. I've adapted. I respect and sympathize. And so I give a little bow of my head, instead, maintain eye contact, making my eyes as 'nice' as I possibly can. Still, most often, there is no attempt at a response. We strive to maintain distance far beyond 6 feet if possible, preferring each other invisible, instead.

I have the cognitive maturity to rationalize this -- to understand the psychological roots of these reactions, to feel sorry, and to know that it hasn't always been like this and it shouldn't always be like this.

But a different fear pervades me: What's becoming of our children? 

We are, of course, under the constant influence of our unconscious processing mind. We pick up things in our environment -- noises, sensations, and intuitions -- that we aren't even aware of. We use this information to learn and adapt without even being fully aware. We read the fear in others, build our worlds around it. But what happens when you can't rationalize this away or remember other times to know this is an exceptional moment? 

A child in the park the other day saw me walking and -- now instinctively -- broke out in a little sing-song, his young voice a squeak: "distance, distance, we must keep our distance. distance, distance..." and he ran for the cover of his mother's legs. What instincts about people and our world are cultivating now both consciously and unconsciously? Is it even living to be bathed in such perpetual fear?

And then, too, are the experiences of childhood that have so profoundly altered, that childhood, itself, is now quite different. Consider the rite of passage, it seems, for a (nearly) teenage girl on a rain-threatening day of summer: A trip to the mall. Our children, simply, do not meet a group of friends at the corner to take the bus to the mall to shop, to socialize, to grow their world a little larger as we did. The nerves that bubble within them aren't caused by the sheer terror of running into their crush while chewing a mouthful of Auntie Ann's pretzel. Braving the mall takes on a whole new meaning.

Will this last? How will the repercussion of the fear that fogs our daily lives mold our children and will they be pliable enough to re-learn if and when it's possible?

My grandparents, who lived through The Great Depression in their youth, spent their adulthood stocking their basement with canned and paper goods; with boxes of dried pasta and packages of batteries of all sizes. They learned to live again, but the fear shaped them with some permanence. 

What is becoming of us, I wonder.