Phillip Frazer
One of the terrible things about our global virus-mania is the endless recitations on tele, online, and everywhere else about where we’re no longer allowed to go (of all the terrible things!).
But how about the wonderful things it has done to us, or for us?
Like draining the swamp known as our atmosphere from the billions of cars, trucks, buses, planes, trains, and electricity-generating power plants, and factories all over the planet – all running at half-pace since we’ve been obliged to stop running so much.
From downtown Los Angeles to the Himalayas (as seen from India for the first time in living memory) the air is clearer.
The waterways too are reviving since the industrial and agricultural runoffs around the globe have abated.
The dolphins in the canals of Venice may be fake news, but Venetians can see jellyfish where, just weeks ago, there was nothing but liquid crud.
And consider the more subtle changes; little liberations brought on by isolating and distancing.
It’s great to be free to see no one and do nothing!
The freedom to meet each day with no obligations of the leave-home sort.
Freedom to do all the things, or at least some, that you’ve been meaning to do for decades: such as sort the photos, the recipes, underwear, boxes of screws and bolts, almost empty bottles of cleaning fluids – and everything else you can sort.
Freedom not to do things like planning every day of that 21-day holiday in Central America or Scandinavia.
The urges that emerge in isolation, like mushrooms that grow in the dark, are also fascinating.
There’s the urge (or is it a need?) to expose, reveal, confess, and empathise out in the open – to weep, and admit to weeping, on the Facebook posts of all your friends.
There’s also the phenomenon of people posting photos of themselves as beguiling youths, or examples of former brilliance in gymnastics, or playing obscure instruments, or being young and frightened by explosions of weltschmerz (which is German for a deep sadness about the inadequacy or imperfection of the world).
The urge to scream like the sweet and prim music teacher in the video – where she tinkles a few bars into a sugary tune on her ukelele, lifts her head to sing, and then screams, like the woman in Munch’s painting (or the fat cat in the version of the painting accompanying this article).
That video has been watched more times than the one in which Trump suggests we can beat this coronavirus by mainlining bleach.
I keep making notes of other liberations, large and small, in our gargantuan social world, slowed down by a sub-microscopic virus, brainless, and with no more purpose than the rest of the benignly indifferent universe.
♦ Phillip Frazer muses on the state of things from the clear air of coorabellridge.com.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
