When Peter Alexander, from NBC, asked President Trump about the psychological toll of the covid-19 crisis, Trump shot him down with: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.”
In fact, as far as I’m concerned, it was a nasty response from the world’s most terrible President.
Everyone knows isolation is causing anxiety to go spiralling like a scream across a world which has been forced to slam the breaks on.
This car crash is eerily apocalyptic—and, except for Trump apparently – very scary.
World data last year showed that more than twenty per cent of households are single-person occupancy.
And psychologists say that most people miss the ‘given’ to see others, talk with them, hug them, or spend time with friends. Life just seems shallower now. Empty even.
Science shows that anxiety and isolation take a physical toll on the brain. They increase vulnerability to disease among people who might otherwise not get sick.
In 2015, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Brigham Young University, found that social isolation led to an increased death rate of twenty-nine per cent.
Well, President Trump I think Peter Alexander, asked you a good question and it gave you an opportunity to come across as a human being, not an arrogant unfeeling fool. But of course you didn’t take it.
How do you sleep at night?
Drinking too is a problem caused by isolation … personally, I’ve always drunk a lot of alcohol and, according to my doctors, far too much for my well-being.
I like to joke I have had a 40 year hangover but I have to admit that it’s actually very very close to the truth.
But I like drinking and I’m just used to it. After all I was brought up in the roughest part of Machester with a pub on every corner and a drunk in every gutter, my father was a rough tough builder and so were all his mates.
And I went into one of the hardest drinking professions of them all … the isolated world of the writer.
Along the way I have been lucky enough to be employed, amongst other things, as a music journalist and, apart from free concert tickets etc, one of the bonuses is that people send me their music. And so do big record companies.
Well, a few years ago a record company – I think it was EMI – sent me a remastering of John Lennon’s frantic Isolation.
Yesterday, another day high above the town of Poprad in Slovakia, in our loft apartment, looking down on empty streets, closed shops and cafes and a rusting railway line, I was searching through my old collection of ‘freebies’.
And there is was … Isolation. A howl of emotion.
President Trump this one is for you.
“Isolation”
People say we got it made.
Don’t they know we’re so afraid?
Isolation.
We’re afraid to be alone,
everybody got to have a home.
Isolation.
Just a boy and a little girl,
trying to change the whole wide world.
Isolation.
The world is just a little town,
everybody trying to put us down.
Isolation.
I don’t expect you to understand,
after you’ve caused so much pain.
But then again, you’re not to blame.
You’re just a human, a victim of the insane.
We’re afraid of everyone,
Afraid of the sun.
Isolation
The sun will never disappear,
but the world may not have many years.
Isolation.
After the doctors and President Trump was speaking about some positive news coming from the pandemic Peter Debbie Downer reporter had to inform the president a more negative news about the pandemic he couldn’t bear to hear anything positive to reporter just trying to paint the president in a negative light to fit their narrative I don’t think John Lennon would even go for that