Yesterday, the Long Suffering Husband and I went on a bike ride. It was the same route we took just under a year ago. That time, the LSH got a puncture and we had to be rescued by our son. Since then, whenever we go out he takes a puncture repair kit and a spare inner tube. I prefer to stick to country lanes, where cow parsley brushes your legs and kestrels hover at the edges of fields above you but to get to them there is a choice between footpaths and roads. In normal times, you would take footpaths. But these are not normal times: there are people on footpaths, which makes social distancing impossible. We had to ride down the busy road, where Sunday drivers, who are in such a hurry, feel it’s better to knock you into the curb than wait to overtake. Anyway, it was on this road, at exactly the same spot that the LSH got another puncture.
“Not many knew when we were young,” I pointed out. “You did because you cycled to school and I remember Dad teaching me after I had to push my bike home five miles from one of my country rides.”
As we were working, a family on their daily walk, passed us. The little boy was terrified almost to the point of tears. In his mind, being anywhere near another person was going to kill him.
After 911, I knew a child, who developed a terrible anxiety disorder, where they couldn’t go into any building taller than a normal house. They had seen planes crashing into tower blocks on TV so many times that in their very logical little brain, they had decided that all the tower blocks in America had been destroyed by an aircraft. It took a lot of work to get him to let go of that fear enough to live a normal life and even then I suspect he is plagued by anxiety and an irritable bowel.
Us humans are naturally fearful. We are designed to fear death and our bodies respond in a way that gives us the resources to run away from the TIGER that is about to kill us. However, as we have evolved, the actual tiger is less of a risk. Now, the thing that might kill us is more subtle. At the moment the TIGER is a new invisible virus that we don’t really know very much about.
There are many things that could kill us but anything new always comes into sharp focus. Add into that the fact that governments have traditionally used fear as a method of control and it is no surprise that we are all in such a state. John Adams (American founding father) wrote, “Fear is the foundation of most governments.” Fear works best to control a population when we are at war and it is no surprise that this government, who has a leader well studied in Churchill, have treated this virus like a war.
You may be someone who thinks that they haven’t done enough and that might be true, only time will tell but if a government is going to use fear to get us to do something then they have to realise that they have to work much harder to undo that fear If they want us to do something else, it’s no good to continue to show us daily deaths and hope we will get excited that only 400 people are dying a day. Tell us about one death and we think that could be us. Tell children that being near people will kill them and you are going to have to work really hard to convince them that it’s fine now. What reason do children have to believe that anything has changed, especially when adults are being encouraged to wear masks in public places?
Suddenly, being seen as the puncture monster yesterday made me realise just how hard teaching is going to be until the TIGER starts to look like a kitten for everyone. Governments have to work much harder to convince us that we are safe because, as the Stoic Poet Seneca said, “There are more things likely to frighten us than crush us. We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
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