Anna Lee Mraz Bartra / Peninsula 360 Press
Confinement has been hard for the majority, but it is evident that it is much harsher for those people who were already living in worse social conditions: the poor, the elderly and for women, in general, life has become more complicated and for more than one reason.
After months of being locked up, isolated from the world, we can already notice that the best and worst versions of ourselves have surfaced, as indicated by the opaque reflection of the lithium crystal of the computer or cell phone, which when it emits light, the electromagnetic waves are obfuscating, negative, contradictory. They make us witnesses of the tragedy that results from human meanness, on the one hand. In the best of cases, we are finding new ways of expressing affection from a distance.
Those who have no choice continue to leave home, exposing themselves and their loved ones. They have no one to leave their children with who would normally be at school while their mothers and fathers work.
Older people are overtaken by the technology on which daily life and the most essential tasks in our system now depend.
It is becoming clear to us that unprecedented changes are coming in the human endeavor. The home, for example, a place of rest par excellence, has become for some an office, a school, a cinema, a restaurant and, in the best of cases, a gymnasium and a discotheque. At worst, a nightmare from which you cannot escape.
Daily life, generally supported by countless people around us, is turning inward like a sock pulled off in a hurry and we find that those daily tasks are slowing down and it becomes more difficult to carry them out. Even concentrating at work is more difficult. We have double or triple the responsibility in the home office, added to housework and full-time parenting. When it's time to rest, the only thing that appears 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 under ordinary circumstances, raising new human beings should be a collective task. Now it has become an extraordinary and monumental task to try to solve within the same four walls that confine us. The size of the challenge will depend on multiple factors and also on the size of the infant. A distinction must be made between those who have school-age, literate children and those who have pre-school, illiterate children, who do not read books on their own, do not write and demand as much time as possible from their parents. We have become teachers, cooks, cooks, full-time animators of our sons and daughters. As if that were not enough, now the school authorities are asking us to create a portfolio of evidence of what our children learn at home and to hand it in when they return home.
Those of us who are teachers have become radio journalists. We talk for two hours at a time to a computer where we do not even see the faces of the students because they have to turn off their cameras so that the connection is not interrupted. The levels of surrealism increase progressively.
Our life revolves around the coronavirus, to the point that a friend even called the feline she found abandoned in the street and rescued it: Pandemic.
What a day! What a year! We can only resist and give the bad weather a good face.
Anna Lee Mraz Bartra has a PhD in sociology and is a university professor. She lives in Redwood City.
