I talked to my aunt last night who is 75-years old, and she remarked that her pandemic life is not too terribly different from life before. She is retired and need not leave the house for work; she does not have any young children at home all the time because the schools are closed, and she does not have all her activities cancelled. The worst she has to deal with is her favorite restaurants closed with no ability to take any sort of vacation. It is the same with my father: his life is not so different than before. They are old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, there are millions of Americans, especially younger Americans, who have seen their lives turned upside down. My daughters, for example, have seen all their organized sports and school come almost to a screeching halt. Their friend\u2019s parents won\u2019t let them out of the house, so my daughters almost never see their friends. Other Americans have lost their livelihoods. If you want to see real pain and desperation, look at the family of six barely making any money while all living cooped up together everyday with nowhere to go in a one bedroom apartment. Yikes! The rates of domestic violence, drug abuse, mental illness are off the charts. So much is happening behind closed doors in households outsiders will never know about. That young lady who had 18-months of sobriety from opioids before the pandemic hit? Well, she is not sober anymore. She might not even be alive. And of course some 450,000 Americans, most of them elderly and\/or suffering from \u201ccomorbidities,\u201d have died after being infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19. Many more will die before it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The situation today in some ways is similar to the culture of trauma and death in 1919. WWI and calls to fight the \u201cwar to end all words\u201d so as to \u201cmake the world safe for democracy\u201d had just ended with huge expense and sacrifice, as well as the Spanish Influenza pandemic which killed some 50 million persons worldwide. Suffering and death on a grand scale. Woodrow Wilson, WWI, the problem of Germany, unrestricted submarine warfare, the League of Nations, progressive Democratic reform, and oversold idealism in general during the previous decade — by 1920, Americans were done with all that. After such an exhausting period, people just wanted to have fun. The Republicans stormed back into back power, deposing Wilson and the Democrats on a \u201creturn to normalcy\u201d platform. The election of 1920 was a reaction against internationalism in general, Wilson in particular, and the interminable headaches and complexity of the modern world. Sometimes the people want the government to take an active role in society, and other times they want the government out of their lives. The \u201croaring\u201d 1920s was the latter case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fun. Frivolous. Scandalous. Light-hearted. It was almost a total refutation of everything the high-minded Woodrow Wilson wanted, at least in the short-term. What did much of the world look like in 1919 — well this<\/a> —<\/p>\n\n\n\n