Social Distancing Was Doomed to Fail
The lockdown has completely collapsed so now what?
The other day I was enjoying a long bike ride on a beautiful spring evening. The conditions were perfect, the sky was blue, the air was clear. I took my favorite route which totals about ten miles. When I entered the last two or so miles, I rode by a skate park and noticed a large group of teen boys there. There were about twelve to fifteen of them. They were all sitting very close together and it looked like they were each taking a turn in the park while the others cheered him on but it was clear that this group of kids wasn’t concerned, at all, about social distancing. I’m sure there are innumerable pockets of people with the “screw its” everywhere that are completely disregarding the demands of social distancing.
The House of Cards Has Collapsed
Meanwhile, all over the United States, protests are erupting, people are demonstrating in large groups, some numbering in the thousands from the beaches to California, the east coast and everything in between. My home state has already had a few demonstrations though we have fewer restrictions than many. Whatever benefit social distancing was supposed to give us, it’s all going to be for naught now. The house of cards has officially tumbled. Trying to keep it standing now would just be a waste of effort. If there’s going to be a massive outbreak of disease that causes significant death, it’s too late to stop it now. And if you’ver ever tried to stop a house of cards from collapsing, you know that the only thing that you really accomplish is helping to bring it down that much faster.
The next two weeks will teach us a lot and I’m waiting with baited breath to see if we see a significant increase in reported cases and especially an increased number of people that die. I’ve personally become detached from the number of cases. Everybody gets sick, the number of infections is irrelevant if nobody dies from it but I say again, the next two weeks will be extremely telling.
We were told originally that we needed to social distance for two weeks and now we’re going onto week 7. Whether you like it or not, the mandates and expectations to remain in quarantine are breaking down. If government officials were smart, they’d realize that this system is absolutely unsustainable.
Asking people to remain on lockdown for more than four weeks is being flat out naive and ignorant of human nature.
Human beings are a complete disaster in any and every possible way. With the veracity of social distancing goals is turning out to be dubious anyways but at the end of the day, we can’t expect human beings to lock themselves indoors for months. They will break down and face the consequences and then others will follow in their footsteps. It’s how we are built. Asking people to remain on lockdown for more than four weeks is being flat out naive and ignorant of human nature. Trying to force them to continue these restrictions is an exercise in futility.
This is just the law of nature, as it is. Water is wet, that’s neither good nor bad; it just is. You don’t dump water on your favorite books and then get angry at the water because the books are ruined. Instead, you understand the nature of water and you keep them far away from your books as much as possible. So why do we ignore and defy the laws of human nature?
Those who wish for us to remain in quarantine seem to be an angry bunch. They are angry at the lack of compliance and the blatant disregard for government and social mandates. They are absolutely furious. They seem to expect water to not be wet and for humans to not be humans but just like everybody else, they are failing, miserably, to learn the hardest lesson that humanity refuses to learn. That you can’t control other people without bringing catastrophic consequences.
The Paradox of Control
The paradox about humans and control is that all of us, including me, have control issues and yet all of and especially me, hate being controlled and yet our history is scarred with the ugly efforts of angry individuals attempting to control others.
If we were actually smart, we should have mandated two weeks of quarantine and during those two weeks we should have developed a better plan. We should have created a new strategy. Extending the lockdown indefinitely wasn’t a smart move, it was dumb.
We should have considered quarantine measures for those most vulnerable. We should have considered identifying those who were the most at risk. Expecting the masses numbering in the millions to stay in lockdown for weeks on end is like expecting a cat to stay in a bathtub full of water. Don’t be angry at the cat, be angry at yourself for having ridiculous expectations.
A lot of people might start dying within the next two weeks and maybe they won’t. Either way, the lockdown has been officially deemed useless and any restrictions that we still have in place just simply don’t make any sense. I’m neither condemning or condoning. I just think we would be smart to focus our efforts on where to go from here, knowing that we can’t control other people, rather than being outraged and furious. Blame will only help ensure further disaster.
When you try to control things that you can’t control, the result is always the same. A much greater loss of control.
We can’t control other people. Not without catastrophic consequences. At this stage in the lockdown that has completely crumbled, we may see cases and deaths spike in number. I don’t think we should blame those that refuse to remain in lockdown week after week, I think if anyone to blame is those that expect the laws of nature to bend to them. Human beings can’t be controlled. But blame is also totally useless and counterproductive. I think blame exists because it helps us cope. That’s the only purpose it serves but usually does far more harm than good.
When you try to control things that you can’t control, the result is always the same. A much greater loss of control. This is always the result. Always. Most people aren’t aware of this unbreakable way of nature and so they always attempt to clamp down and so they just naturally become more controlling which naturally results in an even greater loss of control.
It might work to some degree but there is also one more unbreakable law of trying to control things that you can’t control. It causes you to be utterly and profoundly miserable. The anger, the outrage, the blame. What do you want out of life? Do you want contentment? Peace? Happiness? Joy? Optimism? I promise you’ll never get those things if you allow yourself to descend into anger, blame and outrage. There seems to be an undeniable correlation that the most controlling people are the most miserable ones and they usually want to pull the rest of us down with them.
I have to believe that so many of our problems would vanish, almost overnight, if we, as a group, learned that we can’t control others and to stop trying. Think about it, what would happen if we stopped trying to control each other? The possibilities are endless.
Thinking back at that group of boys at the skate park, I have to believe that they feel the same way that I do. Being imprisoned in our homes with fear being the warden just isn’t a way to live. We would be far more likely to remain at home under lockdown if everyone around us was sick and dying. But they’re not and so we are willing to accept consequences because there is one more undeniable law about human beings. We want to be free. When it’s not given to us, we take it. When the door is closed, we kick it open.
