The Situation Room

You may have reached the stage where cable news anchors are your social life. At first it was disconcerting. Watching cable news not only filled the vacuum but turned out to be better than the life that was taken away by the pandemic. In a lockdown you get to hate the sound of your own voice and everyone else in your pod, but enter Larry McDonnell, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Erin Burnett. Turns out they're more interesting than most people you know, who don't pay attention anyway. If you’re going to have to listen to someone talk it might as well be a personality rather than the old friend who babbles on obsessively about their problems and doesn’t even respond when you try to get a word in edgewise. Talk about new variants and dangerous new stages of the pandemic, this kind of recusal has its pitfalls, particularly when you start to entertain the delusion that these colorful news personages are talking to YOU, with YOU finding yourself indulging a prolepsis whereby you answer questions, as if you were an interview subject, before they’re even asked. On a serious note, whether you know it or not, you’re undoubtedly in a state of shock following the pandemic, the George Floyd murder and finally the living nightmare of the Insurrection. The question is how will you adjust as a trauma survivor once a semblance of the life you once knew comes back (if it ever does)? You may have gotten so used to living in a bubble, with the images of your dinner guests piped in over a flat screen or computer monitor, you’ve lost the desire or ability to interact with flesh and blood human beings.

Read A-Z Quotes by Francis Levy