Corona diaries – day 55 or thereabouts – Status and Various Thoughts in the Doctor´s Waiting Room

Was slightly busy this morning and had a meet-up at a local orthopod practice with a possible view to getting involved. It went well and there´s a good chance that I shall get started there a few days per week after the summer parallel to my other current job. I have to say that a stable working situation without being too choosy feels good with all this general insecurity going around – I´m grateful for it. Even as a colleague I had a little over an hour in the waiting room so I penned down a few thoughts which I shall try to decipher and type in here.

At the moment there is quite a lot of to-and-fro with regard to planned loosenings of the semi-lockdown regime here in Germany. The federal government seems to be less keen to not-at-all keen on letting up until the numbers are much further down, the state governments are probably subject to quite a lot more economic pressure and lobbying and are pressing for imminent loosening of the current restrictions with a view to giving the economy a breather. Germany seems to have handled the corona crisis quite well so far but the economic fall-out is going to be big if not huge. My feelings mirror the situation on a personal level, on the one hand, I feel a certain “childish” desire for getting my normality in everyday life back. On the other hand and on a more meta-view level, I am very wary of being pushed into doing things too soon ie opening schools and other large public interfaces, and causing a man-made second wave that could be at least as bad as the first one.

As a recently joined twitterer, I noticed a lot of discussion (if one can call it that in Twitter) about various conspiracy theories which seem to be gaining traction here and there. I refuse to even read such theories because, in my experience, they are 99.9% crap but I was wondering: what is it about conspiracy theories that attracts people in the first place? Is it that they are an easier explanation for a complex problem? Do such theories serve to push any responsibility away from the believer onto “bad” or “evil” others? Is it a way to divide things up more clearly into “good” and “bad” so that the “bad” guys are more clearly demarcated? I came to the conclusion that the conspiracy theories themselves are not interesting, the reason why some people feel attracted to them is interesting. What function do such theories serve?

Thank you for getting this far! I was then musing about the various phases of the corona era. The early phases, which felt more like a corona crisis, did make planning ahead further than a few weeks difficult and actually this was sometimes a bit of a relief. Now that the first immediate crisis seems to be passing, I feel as though it would be good to be able to plan ahead a bit more with some measure of security. It would be good, in the political sense, to support people in their middle to longer term planning.

I watched “Full Metal Jacket” last night by Stanley Kubrick. Great piece of film which is challenging to watch and made me think a bit. It is a reflective statement from 1987 if I remember correctly. Watching it in 2020 is a bit sobering because one gets the impression that the world hasn´t done an awful lot with its take-home message. America is still stuck in various war-zones without a clear and transparent mission statement or consequent exit strategy, the goal-posts seem to shift about more due to political expediency than actual human needs and Europe still hasn´t managed to step up to the challenge of being a major-league global helper.

It is VE day (Victory in Europe day) today. Why are we still celebrating/remembering at a national level and not getting the issue of victory over national-socialism into a European perspective? The only way to move forwards here and thereby to solve individual national issues of interpretation is to get a meta-view on European history, this is the day that we celebrate peace and a major victory over national-socialism. I think a lot of Europeans and other nations could get behind that, let´s make it a Pan-European holiday day, PEACE IN EUROPE day!