Opinion
+
George Raptis
S O C I A L D I S T A N C I N G : NOTES ON SELF-DELUSION
By George Raptis Many people have written on the COVID-19 experience, mostly because it seems so inexpressible. It is easy to become lost for words when the world as you had once known it changes overnight, shuts itself off, locks itself in. During the lockdown period, I too found myself trying to make sense of this very much incomprehensible time by clutching at words, attempting to piece my thoughts together. On April 6th I typed a note on my phone: “People playing hopscotch in the grocery store stuck to the “X’s” marked out on the floor, f rozen by some unspoken law. Masks on, eyes scanning empty aisles, side-stepping/back-stepping around the f rail man reaching for the box of cereal.” I could only compare what I was seeing before me to child’s play. I dug deep into language and I could not f ind a better way to express how different everything had become.
But it was effortlessly and persistently used by all. It became one of the ways we could prevent the spread of COVID-19; wash your hands, maintain a social distance, stay at home if unwell (I recite these now like a kindergartener reciting their ABCs). The phrase was brandished everywhere; NSW Health advertisements, social media posts, television programs. We began to use it in our daily dialogue in Zoom meetings and phone calls as though the reality of the situation did not already make it clear to us that we were in fact distancing. By the end of the f irst wave in mid-April, we all came to know and agreed on what it meant to “social distance.”
Freedom
But a new vocabulary multiplied and spread following the outbreak of COVID-19. Our very own state premier was televised daily, urging the people of NSW to stay indoors, to remain vigilant, to “socially distance.” This term, “social distance,” is one that confused me. In my mind, the two words did not f it together. It painted simultaneous images of intimacy and isolation that repelled one another like a child forcing two opposite ends of a pair of f ridge magnets against each other. Writer and social commentator Fran Lebowitz voiced her own irritation about the new phrase whilst isolating in her New York apartment: “To me, the word ‘social’ should not be in there.”1 I too had the same hiccup. The phrase was a plain contradiction.
1 Michael Schulman, “Fran Lebowitz is Never Leaving New York,” The New Yorker, accessed 20 April, 2020, https:// www.newyorker.com/culture/ the-new-yorker-interview/ f ran-lebowitz-is-never-leavingnew-york.
+
+
019
