Orville Taylor | Physical but no social distancing, please

This nonsense about social distancing misses the most basic thing about human beings. It is a contradiction. If it is social, it cannot involve distancing. What we are trying to practise is physical spacing because if we attempt to distance ourselves socially, we will disintegrate as a society and open up a big door towards mental illness and social pathologies.

The human brain is an organ. Just as the heart needs stimulation to get stronger and keep functioning, and legs have to continue moving in order not to wither, it does not physically develop without socialisation. We are wired for relations with others not for self-reliance.

Indeed, many Christian zealots take issue with other religions that have a pantheon of gods such as Hinduism, Shintoism with Amaterasu and several more, and Taoism with Yu-Huang and team. However, even the Bible described the Jewish/Christian God as a multiplicity. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion … .” The language in Genesis is unequivocal, and in John 1, it is replicated that the ‘single’ God Christians worship is a composite social being, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Thus, isolation is one of the most ungodly things that can happen to a person.

Such is the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, though deadly, has up to this point only taken nine Jamaican lives. We are fortunate … No! blessed that despite the more than 500 confirmed cases and many asymptomatic among the thousands of untested Jamaicans, our very ill patients and those requiring ventilators are relatively few. We can pat ourselves on our backs and bow in humble prayer for being spared the worst so far. However, the social consequences are far more worrisome. The treatment must not become worse than the illness.

Persons and communities in quarantine are well recognised as being under adverse conditions, and thus, special provisions must be put in place to ensure their fulfilling their basic requirements for day-to-day living. Therefore, we have heard the horror stories and anecdotes from Bull Bay, St Mary, St Catherine, and now those ensconced in the hotels and those stuck on the cruise ships. However, that is not where the problem truly lies.

Behind the pandemic is a deep sociological concern. Human beings need other humans in order to become useful and functional citizens. We are an island, but its name is Jamaica, not ‘no man’. On this little piece of rock, as we clamour through false narratives about the typical family and that the ‘majority of fathers are wutless’ and missing, we have to look at the reality.

As inconvenient as the truth might be, the majority of households in this country have fathers. However, in recent years, what has been skewing the statistics is the increase in the single-person households. A household and a family are not the same thing. For there to be a family, there has to be two generations living in the house. Thus, a couple is not a family unless there is a child or an adult of the previous generation such as grandmother, grandaunt, or older relative.

The Survey of Living Conditions revealed that close to 30 per cent of Jamaicans live alone. Within this category, the overwhelming majority are males, with only eight per cent of all households being single females. Therefore, contrary to the stereotype of the majority of Jamaicans living in houses where there is no man or father, the fact is that only 45 per cent of households report that they are female-headed. However, this only means that the adult female “carries the main responsibility for the affairs of the household,” not the absence of a spouse. Factor in other issues such as unemployment and the picture becomes clearer.

Indeed, in those homes where females are the reported head, 60 per cent of them indicate that there is a man living there, whether a boyfriend, common-law husband, husband or a ‘was band.’ Therefore, only around 18 per cent of homes have a woman living with her children and no resident male. Of course, that is a separate matter from whether or not the non-residential males have any relationship with their children.

CURSE

Without doubt, the females who are struggling to handle their children, especially with unemployment and underemployment rates being higher than males. Yet, as weird as it might sound, the presence of children in the household helps them to cope better and gives them a reason to continue living.

On the other hand, the isolation for those who are retrenched, laid off, or simply forced to work from home is not a blessing for many. It’s a curse. Aloneness and loneliness are not the same. In a country where suicides took 238 lives between 2015 and March 2019, with almost 90 per cent being males, we have to pay far more attention to how we treat our remote workforce.

If the annual average is 80 per year, with no COVID-19 and easier access, open bars, open churches, and full contact with people to hug, just imagine the potential fallout now.

Still, suicide is the extreme end of the scale. Some people need constant assurance, reassurance, and nudging to prevent them from being the next perpetrator of abuse and violence. At the best of times, more than half of Jamaicans are unhappy with their jobs. Workers who are abused at the workplace by malicious employers and supervisors become both abusers and abused at home. Similarly, lonely people who do not understand what family life entails, can become monsters and create other social consequences, which they don’t even believe that they are responsible for. Mother and family nurturing are among the best vaccines against the homicide bug we carry.

So as we ‘tickya’ the invisible enemy called SARS-CoV-2, let’s recognise that rather than distancing ourselves socially, we need to find more ways to connect across the distance.

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at the UWI, radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.