Lockdown fatigue
By Matthew Fraser, Opinions Editor
Though I grudgingly understand the need to limit the spread as case numbers climb and climb, I can’t help but detest the way family has been put to the side or moved to the back burner.
On November 7, the BC government announced new lockdown measures—ones that guarantee a long, cold, and lonely winter for some. The news has clearly shown that cases have reason since the beginning of fall and truth be told, it had already been predicted that a second wave would occur; yet now that we’re here, I have to admit that I am tired of the lockdown.
I am over sitting at home—and I’m sure some of you are too. I am bored of the view inside, the same four walls, and I am certainly tired of online school. At the start when a few people (predominately in the US) were freaking out over the lockdowns I looked at them with contempt. I thought that they were making a mountain out of a mole hill and that good advice should be well heeded in those uncertain early days. But all things change with time and as one month became three, then five, and now more with no guaranteed end in sight, it makes more sense to me. Suddenly, the image of someone holding a sign demanding to go to a restaurant or travelling to see friends makes all the more sense. Granted, we can and I have gone out to eat and seen friends (I feel your judgement as I write this and I do not care) since this all began, but knowing that that could be impossible in the near future is disheartening.
Likewise, a third consecutive semester of online learning is in no way tantalizing and in every way unappealing. I certainly know and understand that many people are thriving in this stay-at-home, self-paced atmosphere—and for those people, I wish you the option to continue. But for me, a plexiglass cubicle with a real professor would be better than another three months of this. The very act of going to school was motivating or at least a necessary step in my daily learning routine. As the days go by, and my chair dies from the hundreds of accumulated hours of being sat on, schoolwork that may have previously been a brain exercise becomes an efficient method of drying out my eyeballs.
Soon, it will be Christmas and travel will likely still be cancelled. Though I grudgingly understand the need to limit the spread as case numbers climb and climb, I can’t help but detest the way family has been put to the side or moved to the back burner. Maybe in next few weeks as we all bunker down tighter than before, the government will reward us with un-shamed travel and socially-distanced ferry rides, but I doubt it. This year will be the year of a thousand and one orphan Christmases and Zoom present openings. I guess a little bit of sadness goes well with your rumnog.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a “woe is me” pity party (though I see how you might think so), just a short accounting of the fatiguing nature of a never-ending lockdown.
