Oh boy, the longer we go into the quarantine, the more the fact unfolds that we are very, very unprepared as a country, or as a society, to face the pandemic conditions. While the at-risk group, the elder folk, are the ones taking the physical brunt of the virus, the mental brunt goes to the children, who are torn off from the schools and expected to follow their curriculum at home, at their own time, guided by either the parents, or teachers over the Skype, or classmates – nobody really knows who, and as there’s no general guidelines that the schools follow. Each teacher has their own method of teaching, some share the homework at Wilma or similar school systems, some through Whatsapp, some using Teams; some prefer distance learning, some have video sessions… It’s all a big mess, and no wonder – the whole school system has had to reinvent itself in less than a week, but one thing is already clear: those who suffer, are the kids. Too much is expected of them and their parents, who are by no means teachers or have any pedagocic skills, leading to even deeper mess – and conflicts at home, too. This generation will be remembered from the fact that our kids come half a year behind everyone else, if even more.
The quarantine requirements are slowly sitting down in my head, too. While few days ago I was still defiant, ready to challenge the guidelines and thinking they really apply to the big masses, not individuals, I’m starting to realize it really means each individual. This also means, my son won’t be traveling to see me to Helsinki from Tampere any time soon most likely, which sucks big time. We do keep contact over Skype but well, it’s like I’m in China and he’s in Finland, like it used to be few years back when I was shooting The Ark.
At work, we’ve been working hard trying to find digital solutions to physical plans we have, and have succeeded with some cases. President’s words – when we distance socially, we need mental proximity more than ever – work in many levels. We humans can’t be expected to stay away from others for too long, and while we Finns are pretty well known for our preference of isolation, there’s only so long we can really practice that. Thus, we need encounters, and while we can’t have them physically, luckily we do have the Internet.
Many others have noticed this, too. All kinds of co-working space software – Teams, Skype Pro and many others – are barely holding up the traffic. Just a few months ago I hadn’t even heard of Teams, and look at it now, how important it is not just for companies doing work from home, but also to kids studying, and more.
And boy, streaming services must have their servers overloaded these days. When there’s nothing else to do, that’s where we turn to and yeah, I’ve been catching up with loads of horror films I’ve missed and TV shows I’ve neglected. Not sure what kind of world we crawl back into in a few month’s time when this all starts to (hopefully) blow over, but I’m sure we’re going to really want to meet others.
While the response to everything is pretty rigid, and some instructions from higher up are conflicting (I still don’t know can we go to gym or film theater or not, have a birthday party or not, etc.), so far I think the current government has done the right moves. Having said that, we also know that this is most likely just the beginning of the lockdown – some suggest this all is gonna take at least another 188 days before things start to ease up.
Luckily, we are living in these times, not say 25 years earlier – nowadays, we have Netflix, Internet and multiple online communication methods, 25 years ago it was nothing but MTV3 and puzzles.
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