Lockdown Cali Style

Another California style lockdown has been implemented, but is it necessary? In the last 24 hours, Governor Newsom has divided California into five regions. If ICU hospital capacity within each region falls below 15%, then that region will be under a strict stay-at-home order for three weeks. The region containing Los Angeles County has already met the criteria for lockdown, and it is believed the other four regions will fall like a house of cards within the next week. As a fellow human who doesn’t want to see anyone contract, suffer, or die from COVID, I absolutely support the basic premise of a lockdown if it helps mitigate the spread. But I am confused by the conflicting information sprouting from the various news sources, our government leaders, scientists, and doctors. I have scoured the internet, listened to speeches, read scientific journals, tried to stay away from social media’s insidious influences, and there is not one group who can definitively agree on what is best for our local, state, and national communities. With this in mind, I can confidently make the statement that I am not the only one who is confused and/or questioning our current state of affairs. Our new “norm” is not a cohesive integration of science, logic, reason, and leadership; rather, it consists of citizen distrust, widespread dissemination of conspiracy theories, fractured County support of State mandates, a breakdown of laws and policies, civil disobedience, confusion over how to conduct our daily routines in light of a meteoric rise in infection rates, and stone cold fear that our rights are being supplanted without due process.

It feels as if days are starting to bleed into each other, one after another, and the only thing creating motivation is the external engagement I have with my friends and family. Most days are a foregone conclusion: I wake up, go to work, lesson plan for my students, try to inspire kids, even though I am looking for inspiration and motivation from YouTube videos, books, counseling, mentors, and setting goals. During this very trying time in our human evolution, I walk around my neighborhood at 4:45PM methodically picking up trash while watching the afternoon melt into evening. Dinner comes and goes very quickly at which point I’m left with a couple hours of TV and bedtime warms my weary head. In the dark, I think about tomorrow and wonder how can I make this life something different when everything has an underlying current of uncertainty. Movies theaters are shuttered, gyms are dark, eating at a restaurant has lost its luster, enjoying a drink at a bar is not possible, playing pool, walking around the mall, anything that creates variance has methodically been removed in the name of “bending the curve”. Sometimes I just go to the grocery store to buy food because it feels good; it feels like the only normal place where you can look around and find some thing that is part of what was once normal and stable.

As our region (Fresno) creeps closer to a complete lockdown due to the pandemic surge, I hold onto the seed of hope. There is a vaccine on the horizon, but I now know our government is not competent enough to distribute it to those who most need this life saving medicine. The atrocities that are being perpetuated by those in power is becoming a festering wound on our collective experience. And yet, they (those in power) are being encouraged to discover new ways to inflict pain through propaganda and creating an environment where opinion supersedes truth. After much contemplation, I am no longer looking to the “State” for guidance, I am looking to my discovered self which was discussed in C.G. Jung’s book “The Undiscovered Self”. Jung discusses how the individual or citizen of a sovereign nation leans heavily if not relies completely on an outside entity to define their present situations: “The bigger the crowd the more negligible the individual becomes. But if the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning-which, after all, is not identical with public welfare and higher standards of living-then he is already on the road to State slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte. The man who looks only outside and quails before the big battalions has no resource with which to combat the evidence of his senses and his reason” (Jung 14-15). We have lost our identity to social media, we have lost our sense of self in the name of American nationalism, we have lost our determination to hope for a better world; but this is an opportunity to become stronger in one’s self, this is an opportunity to form resilience, and most important this a moment that will forever be written in the annals of history.

Works Cited

Jung, J. G. Undiscovered Self. Amereon Limited, 1976.