early in the pandemic i remember reading this comment from someone about how covid might traumatize us about their grandma who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic. they said that until her death she was always very worried about the flu and she would always make sure her house was very well ventilated by leaving windows or doors open
i fucking get it now. their grandma wasn't traumatized, their grandma knew it never went away even if people pretended it had, she knew that airborne respiratory viruses were really bad for you, and she knew ventilation helped keep them away from her
this poor woman, people treating her like she was traumatized and crazy all her life when she knew what was what better than most people
my grandmother (*1922) slept with an open window. Year round. On a mountain. In Alsace. She had the fattest down-duvets I've ever seen.
This was behaviour that she had learned from people who had lived through the flu pandemic.
@eniko Maybe if we didn't equate "trauma" with "being crazy", we could learn to accept that being traumatized is a perfectly reasonable thing to be, and not something to look down on.
@eniko I inherited a bunch of family postcards (usually between relatives) from about 1900-1930 and in the later ones people keep mentioning having "la grippe" and there's one like "it's weird, everyone's sick right now".
@eniko I think that everyone goes through this, one way or another. Those who remember WW2 (fewer and fewer) are being mocked right now for the warnings they're giving us. But they remember. They know. People much younger have difficulty appreciating the wisdom of their experiences, which are alien and abstract to them. Just as one of countless examples. Those who remember market crashes are mocked by those they try to warn 20 years later who are repeating the same mistakes. And so on.
@wesdym@eniko I was reading an account of a guy traveling on foot across Europe in 1933, and something that scared me stiff was in Germany taking about the Nazi party "every household is divided right now" or something like that. It was holy shit that sounds familiar. Terrifying.
@eniko imagine seeing someone not wanting to breathe shitty stale (potentially dangerous) air all the time, then deciding that's simply a trauma response and shouldn't be replicated
@eniko the important takeaway is that yes, sometimes you're in front of a crowd and they're just all wrong. That's not hubris, it's knowing what you're worth and respecting your own thought process. It's hard I think.
@eniko Well, you can be traumatized and right at the same time. I think, we're too traumatized and right to still wear masks on public transport and such.
@eniko I imagine she understood what to do exactly as you described but she was also traumatized by the stupid behavior around her. I remember feeling like that when the anti vaccine people started showing up.
@eniko My grandfather was born after his father's death and never knew him. His father died in uniform at Camp Funston in Kansas during WW1, which is one of the potential originating sites of the Spanish Flu.
It is possible he died in this ward where this famous photo was taken.
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