They say the slide into insanity is slow at first, and then very sudden.
Like the frog not noticing that it’s being boiled slowly, until it’s too late.
I worry that Covid is steadily nudging us towards that sudden plunge.
I think my concern stems from the troubling story of the South African mother who killed her three young children, shortly after emigrating to New Zealand.
Yes, it may have been the result of a combination of circumstantial stresses, including her being off her depression medication for a period of time; but it still confounds me how a mother can kill her own little ones, despite being in such a psychologically dark place.
Or maybe it has to do with the video of the matrics laying into each other, during their year-end partying on Clifton Beach last week.
The sheer aggression with which several boys cowardly assaulted another while he’s on the ground, shocked me to the core. That kid could’ve died!
It’s not the violence as such (heaven knows, we have seen enough playground brutality over the years), but rather the complete absence of compassion; a total and utter lack of restraint and empathy for the victim.
It’s as if they were unleashing months of frustration in that moment.
A frustration perhaps caused by the fact that Covid has forced us all out of our societal comfort zone, and essentially is keeping us prisoner.
While we are encouraged to step outside our comfort zone occasionally for the sake of personal growth, being forced to stay in that zone for a prolonged period of time can lead to the normalisation of those discomforts.
And 18 months into lockdown, it seems that we are starting to lose the plot.
We need to guard our personal and communal sanity, because our social fabric is starting to split at the seams.
One way of doing that is to ignore the white noise of discord.
The sooner we get everyone we know vaccinated, the sooner we can get back to dealing with our regular, familiar problems; our normal abnormalities.