It was one of those break-through moments, one that a lot of us have waited for all these many weeks, since the pandemic descended on us. My wife and I were visiting with members of the immediate family, inside our acceptable bubble. I motioned to one of the grandchildren, with my arms. She looked to her mom for permission. Mom gave her the nod. Out went her arms.
“Oh, hurray!” we both sighed, “a real hug!”
It comes partly from my family background, which is Greek. Our family is pretty demonstrative when it comes to emotions – anger, joy, protest, or affection. We speak a great deal with our faces, our hands, our arms, and yes our voices. It’s a Mediterranean thing, I guess.
Greeks, Italians, French, Spanish are all so tactile – we touch each other a lot – sometimes poking our conversational partner, or putting an arm around a good friend for solidarity, offering a gentle slap on the back, and certainly hugging those friends and family members we love.
Of course, COVID-19 has eliminated all of that the past four months, even the poking, the arm around the shoulders, and certainly the hugging. And for those of us who use those physical gestures as part of our communications lexicon – whether Mediterranean or not – it’s been very difficult to restrain ourselves.
But we’ve done it, because we understand the warnings from public health professionals. My concern of late, however, is the impact all these changes, not just the physical distancing, may be having on those who’re coming through this pandemic, especially youngsters. My daughter and I talked about it the other day.
“What was is like during the polio outbreak?” she asked.
“Very much the same,” I said. “We had to stop gathering in large groups, avoid swimming pools, and we eventually got the anti-polio vaccine.”
Perhaps even more than any of those preventative measures, I remember the fear during the polio scare. At the peak of the outbreak, in 1953, there were 9,000 cases in Canada, about 500 deaths. At the time, I remember my cousin stricken with it, and requiring leg braces; one of my dad’s reporting colleagues at the Globe and Mail became debilitated by it.
Paul Martin Sr., who was Health Minister in the Louis St. Laurent government at the time, had to decide whether the mass vaccination should go ahead (his son Paul Martin Jr., later the prime minister, had contracted polio briefly). And I’ve learned that singer Joni Mitchell had it when she was nine.
“Polio is the disease that eats muscles,” Mitchell said.
But I don’t think the polio epidemic in the early 1950s left the same kinds of psychological imprint that I sense COVID-19 will. I’m not talking about severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (although they likely exist). I think we need to consider the impact of the virus on children in other ways.
Again, it doesn’t have to be PTSD to make it noteworthy. I was thinking about some of the odd after-effects. For example, will smaller children, who’ve largely been prevented from gathering in groups outside of family, ever feel comfortable going to a birthday party again, attending a sports event, or entering a theatre, a concert hall or a restaurant?
On the flip side of that coin, if such venues are a long time returning to normal, will the experience be so foreign to COVID-era kids, that they choose never to consider such leisure pursuits again?
And what kind of additional impact might that have on athletics, movie production and movie houses, musicians, theatre production, clubs, lounges and culinary professionals?
Will the pandemic young people simply give up on trusting the idea of joining, attending, spectating or dining out at all? Or, has the pandemic rewired children to be anti-social?
How will all this affect the way young people communicate (I mean besides all the social media outlets they’re using even more now)? Clearly the absence of the lower part of people’s faces behind masks has left those who read lips (because of a hearing impairment) with few alternatives.
But most of us do more than read lips. We read people’s smiles, frowns, and nostrils to understand full meaning in conversation. With COVID protection methods we’re left with eyes-only facial language. Not impossible, but different.
In other words, in the absence of what we’ve come to believe is normal communication, interaction and connection, has this medical event created a COVID-19 generation that will look back and ask us: “What’s a concert? What does ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ mean? Is there something more to eating out than drive-through?
I hadn’t realized how powerful a symbol of basic human behaviour the simple act of hugging a loved one really is.