GUILT, SACRIFICE AND CORONAMANIA

My mother retained much of her long-term memory until she died last year at 94 and a half. In her final few years, she sometimes repeated herself and/or told stories that didn’t fit within the conversation that was then occurring.

Some might say I already do the same thing.

Regardless, I suspected she retold stories of the events that had most strongly affected her life. And that, as her peripheral and short-term memories faded, the stories Mom repeated revealed that she continued to consider how her life might have been better if some things had gone differently or if she’d made better decisions at various times.

Tina Turner was just singing words put in front of her when she said she never lost one minute of sleeping, worrying about the way things might have been. No matter how many good decisions one has made or how much good luck one has had, most people can’t help but think about some misfortune they’d rather have avoided or some decision they’d change if given the chance.

In her final years, Mom often talked about her upbringing. Her mother died of tuberculosis in 1931, when Mom was three years old. Her father—my grandfather—was an emotionally distant individual. He often stood silently on the steep, Rock Street corner adjacent to his row house. It seemed odd to me.

Pap Pap didn’t have a real job; they said he spent a lot of time in pool halls and gambling. After being an itinerant, early Twentieth Century football player, he ran the main numbers racket in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a then-bustling coal mining and manufacturing town in which Mom grew up. Though I was 11 when he died, the only memory I have of him engaging with me was when he showed me and one of my brothers a half-dozen mystifying card tricks. Despite our pleas, he refused to show us how he did any of them. Not even one.

The word was that Pap Pap hated mine work. Having been down in that pitch black, tight, chilly, wet setting a couple of times, and learning that young men often died in mine accidents and that their lungs became old down there, I could understand why.

At various times and for extended periods during her Mom’s first ten years, her father fled to/hid out in Philadelphia, 120 miles away. During his absence: when Mom’s mother became too sick to care for Mom, and during the seven years after her mother’s death, Mom lived most of the year with her Aunt Sue in Shamokin. Mom spent her summers living with her Aunt Buddy—whose real name was Anastasia—and Buddy’s husband, Uncle Russ, in Morea, a tiny coal patch a few miles east of the metropole, Shamokin.

Mom loved living with Buddy and Russ. Having both a mother and a father figure felt more like family than had living with Aunt Sue, who was a lovely person, but unmarried. When I was a kid, I met Aunt Buddy. From that exposure, I understood her appeal to children; she was warm and fun and didn’t talk down to you. She used to make my mother her favorite foods and take her berry-picking in the surrounding hills. Mom said Uncle Russ, despite having been a baseball catcher, was also gentle and told her stories and listened to her on the front porch swing of his modest home. Surprisingly, for that time and literally hardscrabble place, Morea also had a public swimming pool, and Mom loved to swim. Overall, living with Aunt Buddy and Uncle Russ seemed ideal to kid-Mom.

When Mom’s mother died, her father moved back to Shamokin. When Mom was ten, he remarried, at 49. He had to, because he had impregnated a girlfriend. As he would have a new wife, who could cook and keep house, Mom was expected to live with him and her new stepmother.

Shortly before the marriage began, Aunt Buddy asked Mom if she wanted to live with her and Uncle Russ, instead of with her father and stepmother. While Aunt Buddy and Uncle Russ had raised their own two boys, they never had a daughter and they had an easy rapport with Mom. They would have loved to have her under their roof, year-round.

Whenever Mom told that story, she emphasized how strongly she desired that outcome. Mom knew that her stepmother wouldn’t be nearly as kid-friendly as were her younger aunt and uncle. She also sensed—and later confirmed by experience—that a stepchild is often treated like a stepchild.

Her father might not have minded if Mom had chosen to live a few miles up the road. He’d already been absent for chunks of her life; how much would he have missed her? And while my mother had to do many chores for her taskmaster/stepmother and had to help raise her challenging stepsiblings, her stepmother might have been glad, on balance, to let Mom live elsewhere.

But despite her opportunity and longing to live with her favorite aunt and uncle, Mom did what she thought was expected of her: she moved in with her father and stepmother. Even telling the story at 94+, Mom emphasized the loyalty she felt to her father and that she didn’t want to “hurt his feelings” by living with Buddy and Russ. She knew—or at least wished—that despite his absences, he valued her.

At various times, we all overvalue and overinvest in some relationships. And the passage of time can make adults forget the powerlessness that being a kid entails/ed, especially in the 1930s.

In hindsight, however, Mom clearly felt that her loyalty to her father had cost her much happiness. That’s why she told that story about Aunt Buddy and Uncle Russ until she couldn’t tell stories anymore. She knew that living with them would have been far better than living with her father and stepmother. But being only 10, she couldn’t resist guilt about hurting her father’s feelings and stand up for herself.

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Mom’s life-shaping childhood decision resembles a common reaction to the lockdowns, closures, masks, tests, multi-trillion-dollar giveaways and shots: many people sensed that these measures were goofy or just plain wrong. But they went along because of some mix of misplaced guilt, sacrificial deference to others and/or an unwillingness to rock the boat.

Many people implicitly feel, and major religions and family member or peers instill, guilt for various conduct. Guilt can be functional, especially if one anticipates the guilt s/he would feel about doing some bad act and thus, opts not to do that act.

But guilt can also cause much avoidable harm. During Coronamania, many were made to feel guilty about living normally because others said that doing so might kill someone’s grandma. In order to appease the guilt-trippers, many took or tolerated silly, and often counterproductive, measures. They went along to get along.

Relatedly, many people convinced themselves that Covid sacrifices were intrinsically worthwhile; that pain always yielded gain. Americans are immersed in this notion from a young age. For example, many religions and misinformed nutritionists require worshipers or clients to practice various forms of self-denial, including fasting or doing without various types of food. TV portrays athletic champions’ strenuous, year-round workouts. Movie protagonists sacrifice everything to couple with their true love, win a military battle, solve a major crime or save the world from alien invaders. Cinematic sacrifices almost always pay off. Cue the triumphant music. The End.

But in real life, as with my Mom’s decision to be loyal to her father, sacrifice and guilt can be misplaced and unrewarded. Plenty of guilt or sacrifices fail to yield positive results. Instead, some guilt and sacrifice only hurt everyone involved.

During Coronamania, the media, governments and the Covid zealots ceaselessly conveyed the message that we were “all in this together” and that everyone had to “take one for the team.” But as with the case and death stats, upon even slightly closer examination, this collectivist exhortation rang hollow. For example, though kids were at functionally zero risk, most people supported school closures, thus depriving the young of focused instruction and various, once-in-a lifetime experiences. The elderly, who were the main reason we did all of the locking down, spent their final years isolated and afraid. Many nonetheless died alone from old age, or just from despair. The lockdowns and lockouts also hurt many in their mid-lives in multiple ways.

So did the shots. People were told to take one, or two, for the team. And then one or two more. And then one or two beyond that. I’ve lost count. Many jabbees have been injured and killed. Many of the uninjected and unmasked—like me—have been fine.

The Scamdemic was all pain, no gain. Studies, one’s own eyes and common sense have shown that this extremely overhyped virus was never very dangerous and that neither the NPIs nor the shots saved lives. Nations and states that used a much lighter Corona touch did as well or better than did the heavy-handed without all of the attendant damage.

But despite all of the senseless guilt and sacrifice, not all Americans lost. Many were in on, and benefitted from, the Scamdemic. Some gained politically from the disruption. Others made fortunes. Others were paid to do less, or no, work. Given its large, selfish constituency, the Scamdemic dragged on.

If the majority had timely recognized that the sacrifices our “experts,” “leaders” and peers imposed would hurt far more people than they helped, they could have rejected these measures. They, and the society, would have far been better off than if they hadn’t yielded to the guilt trips that many unreasonably laid on them, hadn’t cared if others didn’t like them and hadn’t made the gratuitous, foolish sacrifices that others demanded.

While guilt can be functional and sacrifice can yield success, this is situation-specific; both can be overdone and destructive. Over the past four years, guilt and sacrifice clearly haven’t paid off; instead, they’ve caused pain and massive suffering for the vast majority. And just as Mom’s childhood guilt and sacrifice haunted her for the rest of her life, the effects of adults’ misplaced Coronamania-driven guilt and sacrifice will haunt economies, societies and individuals without foreseeable end.