DailyJim: Can we please talk about the pandemic?

Hey everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is Thursday, November 7th, 2024, two days after the election in the U.S. Ah, what to talk about today. Um, can we please talk about COVID? Can we please talk about the pandemic? That's what I'll call it. So can we please talk about the pandemic? Can we please talk about all the pain and fear and anxiety and anger and resentment and sadness and gratitude and everything that we're feeling because of the pandemic? Can we stop pretending it didn't happen? I think there's this huge, oh, how did my friend put it once? I think it was right after 9-11 happened that George Bush came out. And I think his recommendation was something like, go buy things. Like he's had this great mission accomplished feature. So I don't know. It was just like he came out and he said, the solution to 9-11 is to go shopping, to read and jumpstart the American economy. And my friend said to me, he said, what a waste of an opportunity. What a wasted opportunity. And that's how I'm feeling right now. We are, I don't know when the global pandemic technically ended. It was probably in 2022, is my guess, when they officially declared it over.

But we are carrying so many remnants, so many unresolved conflicts from that time. And we're just not talking about it. People who are so pissed off about inflation, why are they so pissed off about inflation? Is it because wages aren't going up? Yes, that's part of it. Is it because inflation? Yeah, that's part of it. Maybe it's also because the pandemic traumatized them so much into wanting to make sure they had enough money, just in case there's another pandemic that comes. I mean, it shut down economies. It shut down cities. People, some places couldn't leave their homes. Some people lost jobs. Some people lost businesses. Some industries disappeared, at least temporarily.

And some people lost lives. And we just, it's almost like it didn't happen.

And we think by pretending and ignoring conflict it just goes away but it doesn't a conversation with someone the other day and i said about anger if we avoid the conflict we pretend it doesn't exist we pretend the anger doesn't exist it comes back out when we're angry if we get into a fight with someone else or the same person we can say i'm so angry you did this and you know two weeks ago you did this and three months ago you did this and it's like whoa where's all this stuff coming from? Oh, it's coming because we buried the anger and it didn't disappear. These unresolved conflicts that we pretend aren't there are still there. They still bother us and they impact our daily lives. But we can just go on pretending like they don't exist and we can live in this kind of fantasy world, this reality TV world, if you must, where it's like, no, these problems aren't occurring. They are, they're still there. And can we please have the courage to talk about them.

I may have mentioned on this podcast before, but sometimes when I get the courage to talk about COVID, especially when I'm out, I remember at a bar in Michigan, I talked to a guy said, Hey, my mom was going through chemo and stuff like this in the bathroom. He said, yeah, my mom and sister died during COVID in the same week. And I was like, what? I think he had tears in his eyes. I was like, shit. I talked to a guy here in Kenya when I was at one of the nightclubs or like bars or whatever. And, uh, he said his mom, uh, got COVID. He was in his maybe 40s or 50s said his mom got COVID and she was dying and he wanted to go in there. And the family said, don't go in there. And he said, I'm going in there. And they're like, but you might get COVID. He says, yeah, I might get COVID, but I'm not going to let my mom die alone.

We're carrying these things with us. We're just not talking about them. And so we talk about everything else as if it's the most important thing, as if it's the thing that's really driving the anger, the resentment, the sadness, the fear.

Those other things don't matter that much. They're one, two, three, maybe 5% of the thing. Maybe 50 to 60 to 70% of what's really going on are some of these deeper issues related to the pandemic, related to the recession, related to the opioid crisis where so many people died, related to traumatic events like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown or Chris Gardner, some of these police officers killing black men, and just the trauma that happens, you know, black people get pulled over. These things, these highly traumatic incidences, these things that hit us so deeply, divorces, breakups, estrangement in family, sexual abuse, sexual abuse by parents. I went to an event. It was, I'll be straight up. It's this group called Save a Warrior. And the founder, Jay Clark, was speaking. And he said to the audience, he says, you want military veterans to stop killing themselves, then parents stop molesting your children.

And I appreciated it for being such a bold, honest statement, honest request.

Can we please have these real conversations and talk about the real conflict instead of pretending it has something to do with this or that or this or that? Or can we just get to the heart of the issue and have the courage and the strength to go there? I am just tired of us dancing around the issue. Oh, maybe it was about this. Maybe Trump won because of this. Maybe this is about this maybe can we talk at human to human heart to heart maybe that's the name of a podcast human to human heart to heart because like that's what i really want to do i'm really hoping to have some of these conversations because i'm really tired of us ignoring the important things because we're too terrified to talk about them so if you want to talk about these things please join me maybe i'll start a segment called human to human heart to heart.

That would be really nice but even not just come on my show have conversations with me invite me to your show because I want to start talking about these things with people who want to talk about them hell I want to talk about these things with people who don't want to talk about them sometimes I think we need to be shaken awake and people need to hear the hard things my friend said to me once I said well I don't know if this person wants to hear it and he's like you don't say it because you think they want to hear it you say it because you want them to hear it and I was like that's brilliant. There are a lot of things I want people to hear. And so I'm going to start speaking a lot more and I hope you listen. And I hope, like I said, uh, in the last episode, I hope you put me on bigger platforms, share my podcast with other people, invite me to other podcasts, invite me to other interviews, please. I want to talk with people. I'm tired of sitting waiting for other people to say the things that I think need to be heard. So talk to you all tomorrow or talk to you all on Monday. Bye.