Anna Lee Mraz Bartra / Peninsula 360 Press
Confinement has been hard for most, but it is clear that it is much harsher for those who already lived in worse social conditions: the poor, the elderly and for women in general, life has been complicated and for more than one reason.
After months of being enclosed, isolated from the world, we can already notice that the best and worst versions of ourselves have emerged, as indicated by the opaque reflection of the computer or cellular lithium crystal, which when it emits light, the electromagnetic waves are obfuscated, negative, contradictory. They make us witnesses of the tragedy that results from human meanness, on the one hand. In the best of cases, we find new ways of expressing affection at a distance.
Those who have no choice continue to leave the house, exposing themselves and their loved ones. They have no one to leave their children with who would normally be at school sheltered while their mothers and fathers work.
Older people are being overtaken by the technology on which daily life and the most essential tasks of our system now depend.
It is becoming clear to us that unprecedented changes in human endeavour will come. The house, for example, a place of rest par excellence, has become for some people an office, a school, a cinema, a restaurant and, in the best of cases, a gym and a discotheque. In the worst case, a nightmare you can't get out of.
Daily life, usually sustained by countless people around us, turns inward like a hastily torn sock and we find that these daily tasks are slower and more difficult to carry out. Even concentrating on work is more difficult. We have double or triple the responsibility in the home office, in addition to the housework and full-time parenting. When it's time to rest, the only thing that shows up as an uninvited guest is insomnia.
Another issue that has become - to say the least - a challenge is education. I believe that, in principle and in ordinary circumstances, raising new human beings should be a collective task. Now it has become an extraordinary and monumental task to try to resolve it within the same four walls that confine us. The size of the challenge will depend on many factors and also on the size of the child. A distinction must be made between those who have school-age and literate children and those who have pre-school children, who are illiterate, who do not read books alone, who do not write and who demand as much time as possible from their parents. We have become teachers, cooks, full-time animators of our sons and daughters. As if that were not enough, now the authorities in the schools are asking us to create a portfolio of evidence of what the children learn at home and to hand it over when they return.
Those of us who are teachers have become radio journalists. We talk for two hours running to a computer where we don't even see the students' faces because they have to turn off their cameras so the connection is not interrupted. The levels of surrealism are progressively increasing.
Our life revolves around the coronavirus, to the point that even a friend called the feline she found abandoned on the street and rescued it: Pandemic.
What days! What a year! All we have to do is resist and give the bad weather a good face.
Anna Lee Mraz Bartra is a doctor of sociology and a university professor. She lives in Redwood City.
