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By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Cabin fever is turning ‘calm and kind’ into snarky and jealous

Apr 11, 2020 | 6:47 AM

CABIN FEVER HAS SET IN as we sit chafing at home this long weekend and it’s yielding some unattractive results.

Despite all the friendly, kind and caring advice to each other in earlier weeks on how to put our isolation time to good use, we’ve now entered a phase of snarkiness and jealousy.

The problem is that it’s arrived so early in the process. We’ve only been battling COVID-19 for a couple of months in our part of the world, and we have, at the least, several more months to go before we can let up.

The definition of cabin fever is irritability, restlessness and other such symptoms caused by long confinement. It’s a mental health condition. We can either give in to it or we can fight it.

A lot of folks are crying “Uncle” and letting their baser instincts take over. We succumb to whining about our situation, which leads to being intolerant and jealous of what everybody else is doing or being allowed to do.

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We don’t, in other words, feel as though we’re “in this together” no matter how much the health experts and politicians drill it into our heads.

So when golf courses start re-opening, everybody but golfers gets mad. Though I personally detest golf, I wrote a couple of weeks ago that golf courses shouldn’t have to close because golf is a game tailor made for physical distancing.

Now that a couple of the courses that closed are re-opening, the campers, dirt bikers and everyone else who wants to go do things outside is crying foul. How come the golfers get to do what they want but we’re not allowed to go camping or fishing? Close parks but let golf courses stay open? Since when are they an essential service? Why can’t our kids go to the playgrounds? It’s so unfair.

Well, then, we’ll appoint ourselves as social-distancing police. We’ll keep an eye on those golfers to see if they’re getting too close to each other. We’ll call out a single mom who takes her child with her to get groceries. Don’t stand too close in lineups or we’ll report you on social media. We’ll start counting RVs on the road, writing down licence plate numbers and keeping an eagle eye out for tourists.

Those Albertans better not try to sneak into B.C. or we’ll pull a Trump and ban them, even if they do own big summer houses on the Shuswap. We better close the border. Oh yeah, and watch out for those dastardly Lower Mainlanders who sneak into the Interior to strip our grocery shelves bare. We should call Bylaws or, better yet, 911.

As the screws tighten, we resist even more, like a dog pulling on a leash. More and more restrictions are piled on, threatened fines get steeper and steeper (up to a million bucks now), the lectures get more and more stern, and our resentment builds. Our small selves emerge.

We see photos of throngs of people at the beaches and crowding together in massive lineups for services and products and we get mad, in part because of the dangers they create but also at least in part because we’re missing out. The more the rules are ignored, the tighter they get and the harder we pull on that leash.

We soon begin to turn on our leaders. Those we trusted and admired in the beginning start looking a bit tarnished. We become our own scientists and start to thrive on second-guessing.

We become smart-asses. The prime minister, who faithfully steps outside his house each morning at 8:15 to give us an update, gets ridiculed for using the disconcerting phrase “speaking moistly” as he works his way through an answer. Lord knows the rest of us are spot on with our diction at all times.

John Horgan announces $5 million for mental health support — aimed directly at the kind of stress we’re talking about — and it pisses us off. It’s not enough. What if I don’t have a computer? What about all the other mental health issues?

Political opponents become emboldened, feeding off the disaffection of the masses who perceive, more and more, that their civil liberties are being taken away (and, indeed, they are).

It’s all a bit like George Orwell’s 1984. If you missed it, it’s a novel about a world in which the government controls all information, and citizens are spied upon — by each other — to make sure they don’t do or say anything out of line.

If the tide turns and those who blatantly rebel against or ignore distancing and isolation outnumber those who don’t, we’ve lost. Those running the show know all this. That’s why they keep telling us how calm, kind, strong and resilient we are — they worry that, actually, we aren’t.

If cabin fever gets the better of us, the virus wins.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.