DENIAL
When the Government and the media agree, you can guarantee it’s serious!
The Elbit in us all is not only a panic merchant – it’s also a dyed-in-the-wool denialist of all things we don’t want to hear. Who does? Whenever I have blood tests, the days between the test and the results see me teetering between trying to be positive and making out a new Will while appreciating pretty butterflies, how blue the blue in the sky is, and what incredible things ears are. In the wake of COVID-19 breaking out of China and heading all over the globe, I (like many) initially doubted it could be as bad as they said. After all, people in China are always dying in the streets because their government doesn’t give a stuff about them – aren’t they? Those of us who saw the Tiananmen Square atrocities televised in the 1980s tend to believe that.
However, once Italy, then Spain and New York City began suffering horrendous death rates, we all sat up and took notice, mainly because the WHO, our Government, the British and US Governments and the media all agreed that we had a global pandemic on our hands. Not since World War II has across-the-board agreement like that happened, so there’s a fair certainty we’re in deep doo-doo at the moment. I see it as a no brainer, because if we treat it seriously and it turns out not to be as bad as they paint it, I’ll be happy we dodged a bullet. If, on the other hand, it ends up as bad as the picture they’re currently painting, we can’t say we weren’t warned to stay home and practise all of that social distancing stuff in order to survive. Sadly, not everybody sees it like that …….
I have a sixty-something friend who lives in the state next to ours, and he’s always been a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, I’ve been constantly bombarded with videos and comments that decry the WHO and US statistics, and as well as looking a right plonker, he is also risking the safety of his impressionable online friends. Of course, he’s only mild in comparison to some. We had an employee some ten years back who was right into conspiracy theories, and one of his mad ideas was that the world was ruled by Reptilian Overlords. Apparently, these creatures have a human form but are in fact alien reptiles. He cited a number of famous figures, including Queen Elizabeth and her family, who were reputedly Reptilian Overlords and said he’d seen the proof. I was never quite sure what that meant, because I’d not seen a hint of it in the Reader’s Digest and as far as I know, Prince Phillip has only one set of eyelids. I wonder what he thinks now that Prince Charles and Boris Johnson have the virus – for starters, it makes them lousy reptilian overlords to have caught it in the first place. Additionally, every reptile or reptile cousin in the world must be quaking in their web footed boots at the moment, knowing that if their masters have it, they’re totally stuffed!
I’m sure psychiatric professionals would be able to tell me what makes a conspiracy theorist tick, but I’m not ready for my eyes to glaze over before white noise descends and I discover I’ve wasted a couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back.
Of course, there’s another wonderful type of denial – the one that saw the majority of Brits through the worst of the Blitz. I’d like to be like that in the face of this virus, but social distancing rules prohibit us from gathering beneath the city in the underground system and singing songs of better times as bombs rain down on the city above us. I recall hearing an old BBC recording of an interview conducted with a London householder during the Blitz. The interviewer, in precise BBC English, politely asked a woman, who stood in front of the ruins of her house, what she felt about the Germans now that she had lost everything. Her reply, in strident Cockney tones, was, “I jes wanna know; where’s me bleedin’ postman?”
My husband’s grandfather was a WW1 veteran who’d served as a spotter in balloons over the trenches in France. He was shot down and spent 48 hours in no-man’s-land with a bullet wound to the thigh, and he crawled to safety over two dark nights for fear of being machine gunned during the day. He lived the rest of his life with the effects of Shell Shock, and overcame his tremor by knitting socks for his wife and 11 children. He also served during WW2 as an Air Raid Warden in Cambridge, such was his determination. Following a particularly heavy air raid one night, he arrived home to find that Germans bombs had destroyed his cherry tree. Having survived so much, dear old Cornelius finally lost his temper over a lost cherry tree!
In both of the above stories, the individuals put aside the bigger picture (the horror of being bombed and a death toll that must have touched each of them at that time) and focussed on something else. The bleeding postman and the cherry tree were tangible things in their everyday lives, and it was safe to rage against those things being lost. There was nothing they could do to stop the war or the bombings, so there was no point in going mad over it. I think that’s the sort of denial that gets people through the most horrific times of their lives. Although today is not 1940 and our enemy is now an insidious and invisible one, we can still draw on the spirit of those and many other wonderfully stalwart people who stood defiant in the face of adversity in the 1940s. The Elbit in us can neither deny nor embrace what is happening today, but that doesn’t mean we should continually focus on the very worst that can happen. We need to forget about idiotic conspiracy theories, find our metaphorical cherry trees and keep them safe from harm – if anything is going to get us through this, it might be just the ticket!
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Elbit vs. COVID-19 