Our Pandemic Fantasies

[Kate Greenaway's illustration from Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes (1881), showing children playing Ring Around the Rosy.]

When I was a young boy, and things around me became confusing or scary, I often created imaginary worlds. I did this when my father got angry or my mother got sad, which were usually unrelated events.

I had loving parents who never treated me badly, so this is not about them. It's about kids like me.

In my imaginary world, I was the narrator who got to tell his audience what was happening and how it all worked out. The characters in my world acted the way I wanted them to act, which often included heroic deeds.

It doesn't take a psych 101 textbook to figure out what that was all about.

But there's something else. Beyond family matters, in the 1950s, there was a pandemic that may have affected my emotional development. It was called polio. I almost never thought about it until these past ten months.

***

Kids today have a shortcut escape route to imaginary worlds. They can play video games. What is different from my childhood 60-some years ago and today is that they are escaping into an imaginary world of somebody else's making. So they are not their own narrator.

Among the studies I read yesterday is one reminding parents that tweens are old enough to understand that things around them are not normal during this pandemic but they are not necessarily old enough to understand why. This disparity, some child psychologists say, may leave them prone to anxiety and depression.

That leads me to a related fixation of mine, ADD. Most parents are aware that diagnoses of this condition have become quite common in recent decades. The average age when this happens, I'm told, is seven. 

Looking back, what was initially called "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" (ADHD) was identified by British pediatrician Sir George Still way back in 1902. Interestingly, this was during the aftermath of the Third Plague, which killed millions of people in British Colonial India.

Eighty years later, ADHD's name was simplified to "attention deficit disorder" (ADD). The number of children diagnosed with it rose significantly in the 1990s, as doctors became more aware of the condition and -- most significantly -- effective medicines for treating it hit the market. 

Then as now, many parents questioned the wisdom of medicating children who have ADD, out of concern for what the long-term effects of those medications may be. 

In this context, I remember a conversation I had maybe a decade ago with the wonderful novelist Toni Morrison at 33 Irving Place below Gramercy Park one day about her role on the admissions committee of a prestigious university. She told me that a major problem facing each year's incoming freshman class was whether the students' doses of ADD medications were adequate to help them manage the stress they faced moving away from home.

Neither of us being doctors but both of us being parents, we speculated over whether the medicines actually helped children cope with anxiety or just masked the symptoms from their parents. We both suspected that the medicines might be doing more to treat parental anxieties than that felt by their kids.

All of these memories have been revisiting me during this pandemic, as I observe the palpable anxiety felt by some of the young children I know.

And I can't help wondering whether a heightened sense of anxiety may simply be a highly appropriate response to the exigencies imposed by a pandemic, as opposed to some sort of disease.

Then again, I'm not a doctor or a psychiatrist. I'm just a guy who created his own imaginary worlds a long time ago.

[33 Irving Place, New York City is the former site of The Nation Institute. The late Ms. Morrison and I were on its editorial board at that time.]

***

Talk about anxiety! It's come down to this.

The largest military mobilization in our nation's history is underway to create a perimeter to protect entire capital city from domestic terrorists during next week's the inauguration. The images on cable TV are startling and provocative. Will this ensure our leaders' safety or just further rile up the insurrectionists?

I don't know.

But it is hard to see what else the authorities can do, given the nature and the volume of the threats they are receiving. The intelligence agencies of the U.S. government seem to be freaked out to an extent I've not witnessed since the aftermath of 9/11 terror attacks.

Back then, to state the obvious, the enemies were foreign, but now they are domestic. The current crop aren't Arabs who yell "الله أكبر (Allahu  Akbar); rather they could be those disheveled guys hanging around the corner store.

What makes me anxious is that no one seems to know what is going to happen over the coming days, but everyone is expecting trouble. And this is not over in the Middle East; this is back home in the United States of America.

***

The news:

* Washington locks down, Delta bans guns to D.C.--As Washington locks down for President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, Delta Air Lines put new restrictions on passengers to the U.S. capital, while Democrats warned of possible political violence even after the Jan. 20 swearing-in. (Reuters)

* There is an enormous amount about the attack on the Capitol that we don’t know — the degree of coordination, whether the rioters had help within the Capitol, how Trump responded, specifically, to cries for help from the Capitol and why security forces were so unprepared. And investigators are clear: There is much more, shocking information to learn. (Politico)

* FAA issues special order aimed at cracking down on unruly airline passengers after Capitol riot (WashPo)

* Entire National Mall could be closed on Inauguration Day (NBC)

* A rehearsal for Joe Biden’s inauguration scheduled for Sunday has been postponed because of security concerns, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. (Politico)

* Republicans and Democrats agree — the country is falling apart (Axios)

* A number of extremists and private militia groups had discussed online and in emails the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, activity that should have been enough to put federal law enforcement on high alert, current and former government officials said. (WSJ)

* Rep. Lauren Boebert represents an increasingly clamorous faction of the party that carries Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment message and is ready to break all norms in doing so. (NYT)

* Far-right groups make plans for protests and assaults before and after Inauguration Day (WashPo)

* The more we learn about the siege of the Capitol, the more you realize how close we came to an even more catastrophic outcome. “This could have been a slaughter; the decapitation of the legislative branch of government,” a former senior homeland security official told me. (David Axelrod/Twitter)

* Trump brought leadership turmoil to security agencies in run-up to Capitol riot (WashPo)

* 

Biden to unveil plan to pump $1.5 trillion into pandemic-hit economy. (Reu

ters)

* New York City Renters Owe More Than $1 Billion in Unpaid Rent, Survey Finds (WSJ)

* House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said any lawmaker who refuses to pass through new metal detectors installed in the U.S. Capitol may be hit with severe fines under a proposed rule change, after several Republicans refused to do so. Pelosi said she would introduce a rule change on Jan. 21 that the House will then vote. House members will be fined $5,000 for the first offense and $10,000 for the second. [HuffPost] 

*

Years of white supremacy threats culminated in Capitol riots (AP)

* 

Dozens of people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list came to D.C. the day of the Capitol riot. Most are suspected white supremacists. (WashPo)

* President is isolated and angry at aides for failing to defend him as he is impeached again (WashPo)

* Campaigners to Biden: Environmental justice key to tackling climate change (Reuters)

* Facing New Outbreaks, China Places Over 22 Million on Lockdown (NYT)

* Lady Gaga will sing the national anthem at Joe Biden’s inauguration and Jennifer Lopez will give a musical performance on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol when Biden is sworn in as the nation’s 46th president next Wednesday. (AP)

* Nation’s governors gird for worst, warn of long-term dangers to their capitols (WashPo)

* New research set to publish Thursday outlines how the U.S. government could conjure the full force of its industrial might to build and deploy a massive fleet of machines to suck CO₂ from the sky. Doing so will be extremely expensive and energy-intensive. But the University of California, San Diego, researchers set out to model what a wartime budget could do to boost a technology that today remains nascent and controversial. [HuffPost]

* Medical system in Tokyo under extreme strain (NHK)

* A racing pigeon has survived an extraordinary 13,000-kilometer (8,000-mile) Pacific Ocean crossing from the United States to find a new home in Australia. Now authorities consider the bird a quarantine risk and plan to kill it. Kevin Celli-Bird said Thursday he discovered the exhausted bird that arrived in his Melbourne backyard on Dec. 26 had disappeared from a race in the U.S. state of Oregon on Oct. 29. Experts suspect the pigeon that Celli-Bird has named Joe, after the U.S. president-elect, hitched a ride on a cargo ship to cross the Pacific. (AP)

* Patches — a calico cat who was believed to have been killed alongside her owner in January 2018 when rainstorms sent debris sliding down Montecito hillsides in the wake of the Thomas Fire — was recently found alive and reunited with her owner’s partner. (AP) * ‘They Can’t Impeach Someone They Can’t See,’ Say Trump Boys Cramming Dad Into Homemade Bunker Under Oval Office Desk (The Onion) *** I don't care How many letters they sent Morning came and morning went Pick up your money And pack up your tent You ain't goin' nowhere -- Bob Dylan -30-