The National Test- a Behavioral Pandemic
With procrastinators like myself, and other late income tax filers, the month of April is usually consumed with racing to meet the April 15th deadline. Completing and filing our own income tax returns (cheap bastard that I am) is like having to retake my SAT exams each and every year (though it’s been forty-three years, since I did so). The news regarding this annual bit of bother is that my unfortunate tendency to procrastinate has now been further enabled by a ninety-day extension, thanks to the very thing that stands in the way of creating taxable revenue- COVID-19. Thank you, Mr. President…
…and speaking of the President, now that the President’s “15 Days to Slow the Spread: Coronavirus Guidelines” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/coronavirus-guidelines-america/ ) have also been extended an additional thirty days, the month of April 2020 will subject the entire nation to its very first behavioral examination- a test that we as contemporary Americans are woefully unprepared to take.
Telling Americans to stay at home and just sit on their…umm…infernal regions for two weeks is one thing…but then telling Americans to stay at home for five more weeks is the closest thing on earth to finding out that your immortal soul has to spend an extended time in Purgatory before it can join our eternal Father in Heaven.
That is, except for the parents of school-aged children whose schools have been closed and are closed for the foreseeable future. Their predicament is more closely associated with an eternity in Hell…for both themselves and for their kids, as well.
Never before has a situation come to pass, where the entire American nation– a nation of explorers, of pioneers, of inventors and innovators and entrepreneurs- has been subjected to a nationwide behavioral pandemic…cabin fever.
Cabin fever, the manic form of anxiety brought on by extended isolation and confinement, is a more extreme version of claustrophobia that has been known to make otherwise sane people, crazy…crazy enough, for instance, to pull a stunt like Jack Nicholson’s lead character in the Shining…So, while it might be prudent for parents trapped at home with their children to place their axes and hatchets in a locked gun safe for the time being, the limits of their collective patience will be put to test, as never before.
For that matter, all of our collective patience will be tested, as never before.
Americans are, for the most part, an active and outward and friendly people. We shake hands with complete strangers, commune amongst them in arenas and ballparks and other stadiums, and aren’t exactly averse to striking up conversations with people we have never met, before. Just ask anyone who has ever attended a college or professional level sporting event, or has been to a music festival. Since none of these activities are presently within reach- at the very time when the entire nation ordinarily comes out of its wintry dens of hibernation and renews its romance with the great outdoors- we are left with the same seasonal limitations of internet, television (and moaning and groaning) more indicative of being snowed-in…and without the winter white scenery to behold just outside our windows.
In other words, there’s a limit to just how much alcohol a grown man or woman can consume, for cryin’ out loud…
So, “March Madness,” usually a reference to the sudden and pervasive interest in all things college basketball, has now taken on an entirely new meaning of almost universal sequestration, or if you will, being told by our national “parents” that we’ve been “grounded” for a month…now that having been “grounded” for a fortnight before didn’t teach us the lesson we all needed so desperately to learn…
…and who would have ever thought that this rebellious man of sixty-one years, be told that, now, he has been grounded?
Time for all of us to take the national test, as it were…
-Drew Nickell, 30 March 2020
© 2020 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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