Another happy teen. (Photo credit should read Alexey SAZONOV/AFP via Getty Images)
Last year an experiment was carried out on a group of adolescents to see how they would respond to being denied contact with others of the same age. The results were stark — starved of interaction with their own generation, the adolescents subsequently grew up to be more angry and fearful, drank more alcohol and found it harder to interact with others.
The adolescents in questions were, of course, rats, but many of their human equivalents might wonder if a similar experiment was being carried out on them, too. Certainly it’s not a good time to be a kid. Teenagers in previous national crises risked being bombed out of their houses, killed by polio or Spanish Flu, or being sent to fight in the trenches. What Covid is wreaking is relatively invisible, and while the disease dominating the world is vanishingly unlikely to kill anyone under 25, there is a parallel epidemic of anxiety and depression crushing its way through young minds. The Royal College of Psychiatrists is warning that the psychological damage caused by the last 12 months could last for years.
Rates of referral to child and adolescent mental health services were already alarmingly high before the pandemic; in the last year, they’ve gone up by 20%, to nearly 1 in 20 as teenagers are forced to stay home with their stressed families and live their entire lives through a screen: education, entertainment, their grandparents’ funerals and their own school-leaving prom. And, most important for teenagers, their social life.
Adolescents need their social life the way babies need food, sleep and warmth. Everything from neuroscience to centuries of human experience tells us that the process of becoming an adult happens through spending less time with parents and more time with peers. By hanging out with friends and classmates, developing our first sexual and romantic attachments, competing and admiring, going too far and having to repair social bonds, we learn to be autonomous and independent — just as our rat cousins do.
And yet, as the researchers on the rat experiment noted, findings in rodents don’t map simply onto human teenagers. For a start, none of the rats driven to drink by their solitary confinement had access to social media.
Ever since teenagers first discovered that the smartphone in their pocket could connect them, not only to a boundless world of human knowledge and feline video action, but to their friends, rivals and potential love interest, adults have worried the damage it is doing. A January 2021 report on young people’s wellbeing and mental health is the latest to associate “heavy social media use” with worse wellbeing, especially for girls.
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SubscribeThe simple truth is the needs of young people have been sacrificed during lockdown. The worst aspect has been the action of teaching unions who appear to have looked at it as an opportunity to give teachers time to clean their houses!
Sacrificed? That’s hyperbolic nonsense spouted by selfish stupid people who have no idea about what a national emergency might require of them. If we don’t control and end this virus’s power over us we might have to get used to a continual attrition on our health and life expectancy brought about by a continuously mutating and deadly virus. I’d listen to the words of the people working in ITU who see a continual stream of VERY sick people, many of whom die and many more who will never be the same again. Vaccination will break this thing and bring an end to teh carnage.
Are you aware of the chances of a healthy child or teenager dying from Covid are frighteningly small? Are you aware that teachers are not dying in even small numbers and certainly nor from infections caught in the class room?
We are destroying the lives of our children by not educating them properly. Children are falling into mental health issues that will blight the rest of their lives and are committing self harm at record rates yet people like you are sitting in the house, terrified someone might caught in your direction.
Vaccination will only “break this thing” if we let it, but right now I hear different groups talking about having restrictions next winter. I bet the teacher unions will be on shouting about it being to soon for children to go back to class rooms. This will only go back to normal when make the decision to go back to normal!
The closing of schools was never done because anyone though that the children might die. Don’t be so insulting as to suggest that I don’t know all about who is likely to become seriously ill. The schools were shut down for the very simple reason that secondary aged pupils, though largely not ill, spread covid among themselves and into their families and contacts. From there it affects more vulnerable members of the community and enough of them become gravely ill as to totally overwhelm the health provision of this country if the spread is allowed to continue.
Couple of things:
1. Yes children can spread Covid but if they were the “super spreaders” you claim then teachers would be over represented in the stats for getting covid, being admitted to hospital with covid and dying with covid during the period from September to December when schools were open The fact that they are not indicates that children do not spread the virus at an exponential rate being claimed. There is also evidence from Iceland were they traced every case of Covid and did not find any evidence of covid being spread by children.
2. The general lockdown means children were only going to school. My own children did not go to the shops, they did not go to visit grandparents, they did not go to youth clubs and Sunday School, etc. Keeping them out of school hasn’t changed that and hasn’t changed their ability to spread covid. I still go to the shops every couple of days or the family would starve.
3. A bit of personal experience. In November my daughter’s school was closed for 2 weeks because of covid and complaints by the teachers that they were at risk. We were asked to quarantine her (precaution not from direct risk) which we did. She had to go to the local shopping centre one day and met several of her teachers who were out with their children doing Christmas shopping. So the answer was not keeping children away from school but a demand that teachers apply the rules to themselves!
Are you referring to “asymptomatic transmission”? If so, are you aware of a study done in Wuhan of the frequency of such transmission, that found (among the 10 million people included in the study) not a single confirmed case of a person with no symptoms transmitting the virus to others? Sick people, not healthy people, make others sick, which is kind of what we’ve always understood about the flu and why we’ve always (in more sensible, pre-2020 times) told people who are feeling sick to stay home from school or work, not demand that healthy people see themselves (and all others) as dangerous disease vectors at all times. https://www.aier.org/articl…
1. I trust nothing coming out of Wuhan. The Chinese systematically tried to hide what was happening. The original disease is certifiably less infective than the disease as we now have it, so even supposing information published in China has any truth at all, it is not relevant as regards policy making, ofr the handling of the new variants.
2. A large proportion of the population don’t even know they have covid-19 and go about with it, acting as carriers and spreaders. Asymptomatic people may be less infectious than those with full on infection, but they spread it nonetheless.
3. This is NOT flu. The original version of it was three times as infectious as flu, and the now prevalent strains are much more infectious still.
Experience I have had in several episodes of the infection in my own locality show that people bringing it in ARE UNAWARE that they have it. I live near a small town right beside the mid point of Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England. The area is quite remote with a very few scattered settlements. Up until December, there were very few cases at all in the area – literally a handful. In early December, two executives from London visited a factory in the town which has about eighty employees. Inside a week, there were 39 workers infected with the virus which rapidly spread to the community, as of course these workers went home to their families. Inside a fortnight, the high school in a neighbouring town fifteen miles away had to close because so many of the pupils had the virus, which was also seeded of course to other districts well outside the small town which first saw the outbreak. The version of the virus was what is now being called, the ‘Kent Strain’. It soon passed across the county border into Cumbria and Pennine villages. You speak of sensible people of the past staying at home when they were ill. Do you think these people across two counties are feckless fools? Of course they stay at home when they know they are ill, but they managed to spread this thing far and wide before they isolated themselves. The outbreak was so bad in Cumbria that the local hospital was overwhelmed and had to send sixty patients on a sixty mile road journey to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle.
This is not the ‘flu’ you have been writing about when ICU beds in hospitals in towns such as Carlisle and Penrith can’t accommodate the numbers of people in respiratory collapse that are presenting at their facilities.
I share your skepticism about China, but even a broken clock is right twice a day, and they do have some very competent scientists there. I’m not sure what motivation the CCP would have for lying to convince the West that there is almost not risk of asymptomatic transmission of COVID, when they’ve benefitted enormously from our trashed economies due to all these draconian measures. If anything, it would be in their interests to keep us locked down and mired in irrational and unfounded fear. Anyway, this is not the only study: https://www.theblaze.com/am…
I refer you to the eurosurveillance study on transmission within primary schools. It found there was minimal child to child or child to adult transmission within school settings.
And you think that closing schools will keep secondary aged students from spreading COVID? Because they are at home? Really? You really believe that high schoolers are just sitting at home like adults? They are not. Closing schools did not one thing. COVID cases are not higher in states that didn’t close schools.
He doesn’t care, he’s a Branch Covidian communist doomsday cultist, impervious to science and numeracy.
What exactly do you think happened to the flu during this “national emergency”?
In fact, flu has been substantially suppressed by the sensible, extra hygiene precautions and social distancing that most people have put into practice. As I have said, flu is very much less transmissible than this virus. People are not mixing at anything like the rates they normally do.
“…flu is very much less transmissible than this virus. ” Are you a medical expert? How do you know this? How much less, exactly? What studies have confirmed this? Where and when?
Could it not be that the “dramatic decline” in severe flu cases and deaths is down to the fact that anyone with severe respiratory symptoms and complications now who tests positive for COVID is listed as a COVID case, when it could just as easily be flu causing the illness? IOW perhaps people are getting the flu just as much, only it’s not being diagnosed. And most people, when they get the flu, don’t go to the doctor because their symptoms aren’t that severe, so the case isn’t reported. I’ve never gone to the doctor when I’ve had flu (what’s the point? There’s usually nothing they can do for it, anyway, and I already know how to look after myself when I’m ill.) Younger, healthier people not in high-risk groups were probably even less likely to go to the doctor when they had flu this past year, because they weren’t allowed to leave their homes.
Before the introduction of the first flu vaccines, flu regularly killed about the same percentage of the population every year that COVID supposedly has this past year, mostly (just like with COVID) very elderly people with other serious illnesses or poor immunity. Even with flu vaccines, everyone knows how vulnerable such people are to flu viruses, which is why we’ve always been told to stay away from them when we have flu symptoms.
Also, I would have thought all the anti-racism protests, statue-topplings and riots would have spread a lot of flu around. Not many “sensible, extra hygiene precautions and social distancing” seen at those.
I have assumed that you are writing in the UK and if so, your hypothesis that large numbers of flu patients are being wrongly classified as covid-19 cases falls at the first hurdle. We are running here a massive testing campaign with accurate tests being carried on substantially exceeds half a million tests a day. The infection numbers are of people tested and found positive.
WHY is it that you will use any sort of spurious argument to deny the realities of the situation? It’s getting a bit tiresome.
My local surgery carried out its normal annual procedure, including communicating with everyone on its books.
Tom you fall foul of the very thing you accuse David of! Alas you are so immersed in your own hyperbole you do not even see it.
I refer you to the Government’s own advice on Covid 19 available on their HCID pages… It’s there if you care to look and says clearly that the mortality rate of Covid 19 remains LOW OVERALL.
Your language is couched in hysteria.
Selfishness is a virtue, sacrifice is a sin and lockdown has sacrificed all to all.
You massively overrate the virus and conveniently ignore the damage from lockdown.
No – I DO NOT ignore the terrible damage done by lockdown. I have at different times written against lockdowns, but I am reacting here to posts by some people which totally under rate the damage that would certainly have occurred after Christmas had the virus been left to over run the hospitals, which WOULD have happened and indeed certainly did in some places as witnessed by the shipping of numbers of patients from one region to another. My point is only really that left to let rip, we would have had even more of a disaster than we already did have, and lets not forget that the UK is at the top of a very undesirable league table. We are almost at the top of the deaths per million league, and that is with attempts to restrain mixing and spread.
Teenagers and elderly people in care homes actually have a lot in common. Both are imprisoned in environments in which they are not in control. Adults might be under house arrest but they are in control in their own homes. Teenagers are not.
If I had been imprisoned with my mother as a teenager, only one of us would have come out alive. That is not a joke.
Indeed! 😉
I appreciate your view but I just don’t see it around me. As Mr Lekas says below, there is nothing stopping young people walking out of their house, seeing people at a respectable distance in very small groups (perhaps two only). What is not OK, apparently, is for young people to go out after dark, hang around in large groups, do drugs, have a few drinks (even for 14-year olds), take thousands of selfies – basically to party.
So what are we talking about really here? Young people talking quietly during the day or young people partying. And there is the problem.
If it isn’t a joke, then you are or were mad.
The three older people in care homes whom I know personally are not ‘imprisoned’ as you term it.
Instead, they are looked after with a great deal of TLC by the excellent staff, and all have safely had their vaccine.
They cannot leave. How is that not imprisoned?
Recent experements involving myself have proven that cabin fever is indeed real. If I did not have other people to interact with at my job, I would probably start to go insane.
Try being an OAP with no family living in a small flat surrounded by people who don’t speak English.
Nightmare, you should go and get out as much as you can. Rap up and go down the street you might just be amazed how many people there are out there in the same boat. Good luck with things.
That is a cute and slick answer but not an answer. I am not an OAP and everybody around me speaks English.
But teenagers today do not have such a bad life. BECAUSE of the social media they are not cut off. It is just whingeing.
There’s a large element of whingeing , but it’s not just whingeing. Adolescents have been let down hugely by the selfishness their parents’ generation and as a result they don’t know how to act. They don’t have the psychological resources older generations would have had.
Oh, I accept that, of course. But that is history and how does that change the present?
I am part of the “older generation” as our most of my friends but we, have FEWER psychological resources than the young who at least know how to handle technology with skills we older folks don’t usually have.
On top of that, when you are in you are in your 80″s and know you have far fewer years ahead than behind to enjoy life, to lose one or perhaps two in a lockdown forbidding you to have anything approaching a “normal” life is doubly hard. We got through wars, depressions, sickness, etc but never anything that locked us away from life totally.
What makes me and others feel like lab rats is that we oldsters are often used as the reason for lockdowns because we are , the vulnerable who must be protected at all costs to everyone else .
The good news is that Feb 8th is the time when those of us in Portland who are over 80 can get our vaccine. Of course at this point we have no idea where to go to get it Do we go to the local pharmacy or to the Convention Center.? What if you don’t drive, ,are in a wheelchair and no one wants to take you for fear of being contaminated?
HOW to get it? Do you need an appointment? Who do you call? Is there even enough vaccine for all the groups in 1a, b, or c? No one seems to know from one day to the next.
.
I truly feel for the young.. Freddie’s interview with the two school teachers broke my heart. None of my friends are in favor of closing schools when the data seems to prove they are not the epicenter of viral spread.
. The point is, we ALL have been lab rats and it will take years before we see the resulting damage on all of us.
Dorothy, (if you don’t mind me using your first name) I have a real dilemma here. My wife and I discuss this endlessly.
About a month ago I started to contribute to UnHerd. Quite a lot of the discussion was about Covid 19 and lockdowns. In the UK we have been on lockdown for a while and I saw that others on UnHerd were split about 50/50 on whether lockdown was good or not. I am an older person and I was definitely for lockdown.
After a month of this I have switched my opinion because the lockdown has not produced a reduction in deaths. My wife and I have been scrupulous, nobody comes in our house, wearing masks outside, washing the masks, etc. But I see regularly older people, overweight and not walking easily, very unfit, standing around and talking in groups, masks slipping below the nose. So it is the older people who are suffering and the older people who are in charge of their own fates.
However, I do have one caveat as I say elsewhere. Looking at the stats, about 70% of the Covid infections are with women and 70% of the deaths are with men. So women are talking and carrying on more normally and the men are dying.
How many deaths might there have been without social restrictions? The reason they were introduced was to stop Armageddon.
That’s always the reason restrictions are introduced. But since we’re doing a “what might have happened” speculation, here are some better questions: what might have happened if nobody had copped the emergence of a novel coronavirus? Might we have just got on with our lives? Might we have noticed a spike in the death totals for one year, but left it to our immune system to take care of it? Might the virus have just burned itself out adapting itself to live harmlessly in our systems like hundreds of other germs and viruses we carry around with us? Might evolution, which dictates that a dead host is no use to a virus, have solved the problem for us? Might all the people driven to take their own lives because of isolation and depression and those who have and will die because of missed scans and screenings be still with us?
What would have happened if no one had noticed the disease? Would we just have got on with our lives? You write as if no one would have noticed the bodied piling up outside the hospitals. Have you never spoken with anyone who works in the service which handles our health care? When the London and Cumbrian hospitals are shipping patients to Newcastle upon Tyne, because they have nowhere to care for them, you might assume people would have noticed the numbers of gravely ill people.
Didn’t Neil Ferguson, the “expert” who predicted Armageddon if there was no lockdown, break lockdown rules to go out and shag his married mistress? Obviously he had no concerns about catching COVID on the way, or from her, or passing it on to her or her family.
Dr Feargoeson…
I’m no fan of Fergusson, who has a very poor track record of forecasting very much worse outcomes than actually ever happen. However, Fergusson had already had covid when he travelled to meet the lady he wanted to sh@g. I hate being put in the position of EVER having to speak on his behalf, but nonetheless, here I am.
Tom I would suggest the behavioural scientists discussed in today’s Unherd article – The Governments Covid Comms failure – have done a splendidly thorough job on you. Your doom laden scenarios are thankfully not borne out in reality or fact. You are lost in the quagmire of Government induced fear and propoganda. Please read that article, I hope you find some light.
Did Sweden have an Armageddon?
I think you will find that Tegnell has repented his earlier policy and that they have changed to a more mainstream one of closing lost of face to face businesses , and curtailing peoples activities. They have done this for teh same reason most societies have – very high infection rates this winter.
Nice way to not answer my question.
Of course lockdowns don’t work. Mask wearing doesn’t work. “Social distancing” doesn’t work. The only reason I personally go along with any of this nonsense is because I literally have no choice. But wearing a mask outside is where I draw the proverbial line in the sand. Re. the higher rate of deaths among men, it may have something to do with smoking rates. Are men over a certain age in Britain more likely to be smokers? They are definitely more likely to have heart disease, which is a common co-morbidity in fatal COVID cases.
There are a few logical flaws in that post old chap.
You are VERY unlikely to contract covid 19 through having a sensibly spaced conversation outside in the open air, masked or not.
The fact that social restrictions on mixing and movement have not entirely suppressed the disease does not mean that restrictions have not had an effect. It just means that the disease is very transmissible and will infect you if you allow it to get near you. Had we not had restrictions it would have been much worse.
In any case, we now see a decline in infections of a significant sort.
You will receive a letter from NHS directing you to a website where you can select a vaccination centre near you and book an appointment.
I know this because at aged 69 and three quarters, I received a booking form to go and get my two vaccinations. The first will be on February 14th and the second on May 9th. If you can handle posting on this forum, you will easily be able to handle the booking form. It took five minutes.
It is also possible that you will be contacted by your GP and asked to attend the surgery. There are several arms to this extremely successful campaign to vaccinate as many people as possible.
In the UK we get a NHS letter, plus contact from our local surgery. Appointment details are handled online or by phone.
Best wishes to you in Portland.
I truly do not understand why so many say we are ruining the young these days.
My teenage son says: “sorry, mom, I know lots of people are suffering, but these are such happy days for me.”
I understand, they hate routine, so they (my son+his friends) loved staying home March to July instead of getting up very early in the morning, commuting etc.
Yes, the teens missed summer traveling.
But they were very happy to be back to school Sept-December. And then, the current lockdown brought some welcome change again!
Everybody spends lots of time with friends on Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams etc. He does not feel lonely in the least.
I think, it is the parents who are suffering being locked together with the kids for months.
And yes, we are very lucky with our school, they organised good online classes, now even some clubs are available online. And he has more time now for just reading a book (not having to commute saves about 2.5 hours a day).
I’m glad your son is happy. But the soaring rates of depression and suicide among the young suggest that generally speaking, the kids are far from all right. When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I spent my summers going to every outdoor music festival and concert I could. I went to live music bars, concerts, and movies all the time throughout the rest of the year. I rarely drank very much. I just loved GOING OUT. Listening to great music, dancing, talking to people, flirting. Or just hanging out with myself, but enjoying being somewhere interesting and different, rather than stuck at home. I ate out with friends all the time too, mostly at little family-owned Chinese or Vietnamese places where we could feast for very little money. On weekends those places were always packed, but we didn’t mind waiting for a table for 30 minutes or more. Home – for most of us at that age, either a tiny, cramped shared apartment, or the family home with bothersome parents and siblings and little to no privacy – was a place to go when you were tired. Life was lived away from home. Going out a lot was what kept me from despair in those years, because even then, there was a lot to despair about.
Too true. One of the WORST tendencies of recent times is the constant whining about mental health. If ever there was away of damaging morale and the ability to cope, that is it. You actively spread failure by doing that.
is it also whingeing when the elderly die in isolation? Because that’s happening, too, and it is no more justifiable than what’s being done to kids. Perpetual house arrest – and that’s far more accurate than lockdowns or other terms – eventually wears on a person. When Japan, of all places, has a month in which suicides are higher than ALL covid deaths, maybe there’s a clue to be explored.
Not quite understanding you and you don’t usually hide behind irony or sarcasm. Are you saying that the death of a lonely person is equal to a year or two away from friends for a young person? I don’t see how you can compare the two.
Young people are less cut-off than they have ever been in history. They have a chance to do something different like follow the discussions on UnHerd. They can make a million friends, discuss things with people in Outer Mongolia (if they speak the language). And this for about a year. Is this the end of the world?
The Japanese hold suicide as an honorable way out of an impossible situation – somewhat culturally routine although now discouraged.
That’s a bit of a generalized comment. I lived and worked in Japan for a few years. I certainly never got the impression that any Japanese consider suicide “honourable”. They consider it tragic, and it devastates people’s families and friends when it happens. There are complex and varied reasons why Japan has such a high suicide rate.
Just to clarify that, according to CNN:
In Japan, more people died from suicide last month (Oct 2020) than from Covid in Jan-Oct 2020.
I am not sure going up and down the street rapping will get him very far.
Yes, the behaviour of the politicians and teachers/teaching unions in condemning young people to these restrictive lockdowns has been utterly wicked. But why are all the young people so compliant? Surely they can find ways to meet up, even if only in small groups.
Is any sane person surprised that humans of any age might struggle with forced isolation? Knowing that, someone has to explain how what is unfolding is not intentional. Foreseeable consequences are never accidental; from psychologist to layman, anybody could have said that this was going to create problems, but it happened anyway and, in some places, continues. For what beneficial purpose is this being done?
It’s really a very bad thing for adolescents to be isolated. At that age they should be fighting and ( another f I can’t remember).
Teachers are in no hurry whatsoever to return to work. Sat at home month after month after month on (almost) full pay without any hassle or travel arrangements to bother about wouldn’t we all? Shameful how they are continuing to derelict their duties with our children. Utterly shameful.
I don’t know that many teachers, but those I do are actually keen to get back to work in a school.
I sincerely hope you are right Nick I really do but the way people (and particularly the ‘unionised peoples’) are these days makes me very cynical ….
I think this is mostly untrue Andrew. Most teachers understand the detrimental effect this is having on young people and want to get back to the classroom. Teaching and learning is performative, it’s a live experience that doesn’t translate well via a screen and speakers. Diligent teachers understand this; they enjoy the classroom element of the role more than any other. But you are, to some extent, correct; there are some who don’t want to work. That said, there are slackers in every single job that exists. I don’t think this subset is any larger in teaching than it is in any other industry or sector. Of course, I’m pretty sure anyone who has been working from home is going to miss the hour extra in bed, the extra time in the evening with family or whatever, and the not having to put on a shirt and tie, or heels (or both, if that’s how they roll). That’s just human nature! Hopefully the conversation about a better work-life balance will continue after this whole thing is over.
On the positive side, I think COVID has led to a situation where many teenagers are actually missing school. Who’d have thought it?
I agree with you but somebody should mention this to your unions. My daughter is a teacher and she wanted to work as normal but the day before the lockdown was announced (in Wales) the NASUWT called a meeting to discuss strike action. My daughter said that nobody ever dared to vote against the union because they would be sent to Coventry in the staffroom.
For our US viewers, ‘sending to Coventry’ is an idiom meaning to be shut out of conversations.
I very quickly left the union I was a member of once I found out what they were all about. Clamour for strikes about pay does not sit well with me when I’m being paid reasonably well. If the conditions could be improved (which for many teachers they could by cutting some of the bureaucracy), then lobby for that with reasoned arguments. I wasn’t prepared to stand outside the gates with a placard for a bit of extra money that I didn’t really need. I made my objections clear in meetings, and so did several of my colleagues. Perhaps your daughter is at a more left-leaning establishment? (They aren’t all like that despite what you might think).
As for teachers and school staff wanting to be shifted up the vaccination queue; don’t get me started on that. It’s embarrassing.
This is very true in the US. Some states and cities (mostly republican run) have had their kids back in school for quite some time but blue state teachers unions are refusing to have the teachers return to the classroom, in spite of the science. Chicago teachers threatened to strike if they had to go back. They simply do not care what they are doing to the students as long as they get to avoid going to work.
I think this is the case. To be honest, I much prefer teaching from home than commuting to work for purely selfish reasons. However, I’m also aware that students seem to do better with a teacher in front of them and I’m more than happy to go back to the classroom. Saying that I’m hoping the coronavirus pandemic will bring much-needed changes into the education system. Now that parents are seeing what their children are being taught, they’re really questioning whether school and Higher Education are worth it.
You may be correct. At least I hope you are. And thanks for caring about your students enough to want to do the right thing for them.
Why wouldn’t they do everything they can to avoid going back to work, if they are still getting full pay?
Some teachers consider the needs of their students as well
Teachers do, unions – never.
Is anyone, here, at UnHerd, optimistic about the future? Based on the experiences I’ve been having, here, in NYC, and the information presented into this really fine article, I am not optimistic….
I am. I don’t live in NYC anymore but I was born there. But the past year has exposed and clarified many things for people, in the US and around the world. Whether you think the COVID situation has been handled well where you live, people tend to vote with their feet and I do believe that people will leave some US states in droves. Where I live, students have been back in school since last September while kids in Chicago likely won’t be back for a long time.
The great thing is that people are mobile and can move to achieve a better quality of life. While I would love to live in NYC again for so many reasons, it simply isn’t well governed. Quality of life is relative and people will move to better theirs. Some states will benefit, others will lose.
I do believe that society will bear the brunt of a massive uptick in anti-social behavior among the teens discussed in the article though over this disastrous restriction of their lives. You reap what you sow. As usual it will be poorly addressed in some areas and better addressed in others.
This is the premise of the American experiment, really, that people are free to move from one state to another and that they must compete for residents (ergo taxes).
I fear that Biden is going to federalise this option out of existence because it is probably impossible for him to achieve his more authoritarian aims without doing so.
You may be right. Let’s hope not.
I am optimistic but I don’t live in the USA. The difference for me lies with guns. If you have a group of people wandering around in the daylight in Louisville with semi-automatic weapons strapped on their shoulders, how do you handle the situation when somebody gets angry? And plenty of people will get angry.
I think, as maybe Annette says below, that some states, especially in the South will have problems and it will be difficult for sane voices to make themselves heard.
In Europe or in the UK we are not as extreme. We have more chance to be calm and think about things properly.
I actually said the exact opposite. Southern states have handled COVID much better than NY, CA or IL. Kids have been back in school in Sept in most of the south. Who knows when they will ever get back in non southern states. They will have to accept the increase in anti-social teen behavior that accompanies the union demands just as poorly managed UK cities will have to.
Louisville is an interesting case. I went to college with the mayor and he is a disaster of a mayor. He lets people riot and no one gets charged with destruction and criminal behavior. Crime is out of control for the same reason. Subsequently people are moving out of Jefferson County. No one wants to live with that. Louisville makes my point nicely, in fact. Well governed cities and states will benefit, poorly governed ones will lose. You don’t have to live with gun crime in the US. But you do have to make the choice not to. Its not hard to do.
I have to accept what you say. I worked for a year or so with a company in Louisville so I could only talk about that city. Usually I stayed in a hotel in the centre of Louisville about 100 yds from Barnes and Noble and I heard gunfire almost every night.
Yup. And the people of Louisville are okay with it or they would elect different leaders. Those that are not okay with it move to Shelby County next door. Why Americans who choose not to live in such places are supposed to feel sorry for people who elect leaders who don’t care about them is a mystery but I can tell you that most do not. They made their bed.
You make it sound like a simple question of choice. If you find your neighborhood has deteriorated through poor law enforcement and you are in low paid work or living on welfare how easy is it just to move to a well governed city or state? Obviously, those who can move will move. The rest are left behind in a hell created by the lawless.
When crime is out of the control of legitimate authorities then power at a local level moves to those who can use more basic and primitive methods to enforce their will. Those who call for the police to be defunded may be hoping for just such an outcome.
Of course it’s a matter of choice. Several choices in fact. The first choice you have is electing poor leaders like in Louisville. You don’t have to elect people who won’t stop crime. If you do, that’s your choice. Second, move. Lots of people move to escape crime and poor public education. If you’re fine living with crime that’s your choice. I have no sympathy for people who elect bad leaders and then whine that they have to live with crime. Where I live crime is almost non existent. Because the public here won’t put up with it and criminals know they’ll be prosecuted if they try it. Plenty of gun owners live here, almost zero gun crime. Because…..it would be prosecuted.
Of course(?!)
Your choice may not tally with that of the majority of voters and thus their will prevails over yours. That’s democracy for you ““ tyranny of the majority.
You may not want to elect people who won’t stop crime but if such people are given power by a majority who have been persuaded that the police are an oppressive force acting on behalf of the privileged what can you do?
You should move (of course!). Lots of people move to escape crime and other problems not of their making (who’d have thought it). Do you actually know anyone who is caught in the poverty trap? If so, ask them why they don’t just move.
Of course the voters will prevails, as it should. People vote for high crime all the time. It’s their right to do so. Chicagoans have been voting for over the top gun crime for decades. New Yorkers have been voting for horrendously poor public services. No one feels sorry for them, they chose it. Where I live we don’t have to put up with gun crime even though lots of people own guns. If you live where the mantra is that the police are oppressive, what are you doing to dispute that? What are you teaching your own kids? The privileged move away. Sadly the communities stuck with reduced police will experience even more crime. It hurts poor people the most.
Others would rather accept the high crime and poor services in cities that have them. They get to choose that. But they don’t get to vote for leadership that permits gun crime, bad public schools and poor services and then complain that they can’t just move away from the mess they voted for. If they can’t move away then perhaps they should take that into account when voting, that they are going to have to live with the results while others can move away. It’s even more important that people who can’t move away do not vote for poor leaders.
This has been my experience as well. Where I live in my corner of the South, lockdown restrictions have been minimal. There have been quite a few COVID deaths, but there isn’t the media fear surrounding it that you see in other parts of the US.
Luckily, living in what is loosely termed ‘the West’, things are never quite as bad as we’ve often imagined them to be, and I include myself in that. That it is the hope that I cling on to in my darker moments.
We’re not cowering, forgotten by the world, in a bombed out building with bullets whizzing over our heads somewhere in Syria after all.
That said, I struggle on a daily basis to get my head around the logic of what’s going on at the moment.
My wonderful, bright, sweet kids can’t go to school or socialise normally, good people I know have died in less than ideal circumstances because of covid not of it, my wife’s been furloughed again, and yet I’m by far one of the lucky ones.
Business is booming, partly thanks to this s#*tshow, but I am also surrounded by good, otherwise hardworking people whose businesses aren’t and who may yet lose them through no fault of their own.
‘Hell’ is a relative concept, but whatever it might be to you, as a great man once said, when you think you’re walking through the middle of it the only thing to do is keep going.
You are right that things are not historically terrible at the moment. Certainly not for me and not even for those less lucky who have trouble with jobs, income, family etc. It does not compare to what is happening in Syria or many other places or times, even in recent history.
HOWEVER what really makes this terrible is the fear that this is the just the beginning and that there will always be another excuse to continue the lockdowns (vaccines not stop transmission, or mutant viruses or…) and that we will have to wear masks even when C19 is long gone to protect people from the norrmal flu or the next pandemic season. Also that too many Govts think that when something bad happens that they have to ‘do something’ even when they have no proof or certainty that this ‘something’ will have a good result.
As far as I can tell there is no serious evidence that lockdowns work while there is masses that the consequences of lockdown are disastrous.
Perhaps just as importantly what is this doing to the rats? They seem to be taking over my garden since last March. I can at least shout at the teenagers.
Shouting at the rats is about as effective as shouting at the teenagers – neither listen, and if you could speak rat I’m sure you would hear the sullen response.
I swear that the rats where I live all say, “Whatever”.
“beth bynnag” or are they displaced scousers?
The screen addiction and doom scrolling indeed reduce social interaction and the ability to understand nuance, particular body cues. I’m not sure what that means for future social success when the consequences of perception error are more serious. One real consequence is the issue of concentration and attention span (TL:DR) when full comprehension of complex topics must be mastered. Those still able to grasp will succeed, others will struggle. Still, our natural inclination for curiosity as humans remains. While in the short term we will experience discomfort, the trend lines are likely to correct over time.
I see some teens defying their elders and gathering despite all the community tut-tutting. These rebels can become future leaders or worse. But some non-rebels will and are failing as they absorb screen world barbs as reality. I fear for those teens.
Just a quick reminder: These teens will soon own the world. Regardless of our opinions on them, that will happen. Might as well drop the antagonistic frowny approach and help them as much as we can. We are men of our times, they’ll be of theirs. Let’s cut them some slack and give them some love, shall we?
Ah – boo hoo – the kids are a bit upset. The students should be having teh time of their lives and they aren’t. Poor them. Poor the rest of us. We’ve already seen a hundred thousand dead and countless thousand with likely permanent long covid and life damage far worse than the disruption we’ve all seen. This is like a war. You have to expect some disruption. In fact more people have died of covid than died in the Blitz. The young lads and lasses born in 1920 like my mother had their lives disrupted when they should have had it all too. At least this generation are not being burned alive in Wellingtons and Lancasters or in Spitfires. I know which I’d prefer between a choice of learning on line or being sent abroad to war for five years.
A repugnant outlook and expression.
Guilt-ridden piece, where the word ‘we’ in the headline is misplaced. Actually, blame Wuhan and C-19.