Are Covid restrictions that bad?

What I am going to write now is not my own idea. I found it on the Facebook page of Emal Roshandel, who lives in Denmark. But I agree with much what he wrote there and I think that it’s so important that I want to share it with others. Moreover, it certainly fits in my blogs, for isn’t it about the question “Who are we?”, which is one of the leading themes of my blogs. However, I’ll not give a literal translation of Roshandel’s Facebook post, but I’ll write my own version. 

Let’s assume that you were born in the year 1900 and that you had a happy childhood. Then in 1914 the First World War broke out. If you were a boy, you were too young for the army, but if you lived in Europe (or in the USA, later) probably your father and uncles had to fight, and maybe your elder brother as well. Many of them didn’t come back from the war and you and those who stayed home suffered from hunger and many goods were in short supply. You were happy when the war ended and your father came back, but then a pandemic broke out, the Spanish flu, which hit especially younger people, like you, now 19 years old. You recovered and gradually times became better. You were in your twenties, maybe married, and faced the future with confidence. Alas, the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange and the economic crisis that followed made you unemployed and your savings soon became worthless by the high inflation. In the end you overcame the difficulties, got a good job again, when – you had become 40 years old – the Second World War broke out. Although you weren’t maybe an immediate victim, these were dark times. There were lockdowns, shortages of food and goods, people you knew disappeared. But also this came to an end.
I can go on, and mention yet the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the oil crisis of the 1970s, or, if you lived in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, the communist repression. There is certainly much more to mention, and Emal Roshandel mentions on his Facebook page also some other events. If you live outside Europe and the USA, you’ll certainly think of other bad experiences.
Be it as it may, let’s now assume that you were born in, say, 1980. Today, you are 41 years old. If you are one of my readers, probably you didn’t go through even one event of the kind described above. (Note, that I don’t mean personal, private sad experiences, but world experiences like those described above.) However, now you have to go through a pandemic that broke out about almost two years ago. And you complain. Sometimes there are lockdowns; you cannot go to the cinema or to concerts during several months. You cannot always meet your friends; schools are closed. And so on. Moreover, you complain that you have to wear a face mask and that people ask you to be vaccinated. People who say that you must adapt yourself to the situation don’t understand you, you think, for these people don’t know what a difficult life is, you think. However, you have a lot what the generations before you didn’t have: All services, like power, food supply, public transport and whatever function well. Even more: you have the internet and your mobile, which didn’t yet exist when you were born. Must I go on?
I don’t want to say here that you deserve it to suffer what your parents or grandparents have suffered. I hated it when my father said that I had to eat what was on the table, since during the Second World War he couldn’t get to eat what he liked and sometimes he was hungry. And, indeed, probably your grandparents didn’t experience all calamities I mentioned above, or maybe they didn’t personally much suffer from them. I don’t want to say: Once the times were so bad and now they aren’t, so you must be happy (although also today yet many people must flee from war and economic misery). You must live your own life in a situation as it is today for you. You have the right to complain about stupid restrictions. You have also the right to complain because you don’t feel happy. But be real. We live now in a situation of a world pandemic and actually at the moment nobody knows how to stop it. So, adapt yourself. Do what you can and do not complain about what you cannot.
I want to end this blog with a quote from Roshandel’s Facebook post: “Today we live in a new world full of comfort, but unfortunately in the middle of a new pandemic. … But humanity survived these conditions, and they never lost their joy of life.”
It is as it is.