De-Nile

Have you heard the old saying, “He’s living in denial?” It’s not about some exotic river in Africa, but a mental place we all go sometimes. 

I can act like something isn’t there, can’t you? I deny reality as a strategy to manage unpleasant things. 

For example, I have gone to the cookie jar when I knew I ate the last cookie yesterday. But I was in hope, just hope that I remembered it wrong, or I only dreamed that I ate the last cookie! Or maybe someone else snuck in and replaced the cookies.

I have seen guys and girls driving on flat tires acting like it wasn’t flat. You know the kind of flat where what is left of the tire is flapping the street over and over as the car grinds off the edges of the wheel. They are leaning to one side and acting like, “Nothing to see here, my car was designed to tilt to one corner.”

Let’s say your marriage is unhappy and your spouse says, “We should go to counseling.” But you say, nah, it’s not that bad. And the years go by and later your spouse says, “I want a divorce.” And you say, “Let’s go to counseling!” But it may be too late. 

We go into denial when we don’t know how to deal with something, or when we just find it too difficult to face. Denial is a normal human reaction to losses and tough times.

What happens when you come across a tough situation that you have never seen before? You compare it to what you have seen. Your brain scours its memory and decides it looks, acts, smells like this other thing that you know something about. But what if it is a whole new thing? 

The truth is, a global pandemic is something none of us has ever dealt with before. Other generations have dealt with pandemics, but we have not.

As a reaction, some people have chosen denial. The coronavirus crisis has a lot of deniers. People call it the fake virus. Or it’s the exaggerated crisis. I can't wrap my head around it, so I will just deny it exists or deny that it's that serious.

We can be in denial of invisible things. If I eat lots of meat, starches, and desserts because they taste good, I might not admit the health problems they cause for a while, because they are easy to ignore.

In the US, I think of how we reacted to 911 when there were 3000 deaths, how is it we can be in denial when there are almost 1000 deaths a day from the coronavirus?

The number of people reported to contract the illness is in the millions and growing, not just in number but in rate of increase. The number of deaths is staggering. 

Some say the numbers are inflated. But what would be the purpose of the CDC or other sources to continue to inflate these numbers? Is it a conspiracy big enough to extend around the world to all other countries who report illness and deaths?

This crisis is a whole new thing to everyone alive in 2020. So, it calls for a different response. It just might be a response that has to be created along the way as more knowledge about what we are fighting becomes available. This calls for openness to new information, learning and deciding as we go, and refusal to oversimplify. Life is changed; some jobs and ways of living may end, while others will flourish. 

What will be our legacy?

How will our response be remembered in the history books? Will it say these people’s denial made it far worse than it had to be? They wanted their money and their familiar routines more than their own health and the health of their neighbors? As a result many more people died than had to. And many more people contracted a disease whose negative effects lasted their lifetimes. 

We can leave a different legacy. Before World War II Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minster of England. He was in denial of the danger of Hitler and Nazi Germany. He appeased them, giving away lands that were not his to give. He left a shameful legacy of denial. Churchill, on the other hand, became a great leader of a country that was battered by war, in ways that it had never faced before. Whether it is a country, a community or your family, we can all lead. What do you know are the right things do be doing now? Let’s do them! And as we learn more, let's do what is next to face our situation, not be in denial of it.