Our society is built on queues. At any amusement park, there are inevitably winding lines of people packed one after another in long progression, following in each others’ footsteps without a second thought. We stand in queues in supermarkets, the DMV, everywhere.
As we pass one another on the sidewalks, protocol is to step to one side or another as we pass others oncoming, passing within a foot of each other and obligated to nothing more than a nod or a smile, if anything at all.
We are bred and raised on the idea that there is safety in numbers, and faces, familiar or not, are what we count on to keep us from gloomy and foreboding walks down paths and avenues alone and vulnerable.
Our personal space is an undiscussed, instinctively passed-on and understood, sense of entitlement that roughly equals an arm’s length. We subconsciously accept and even appreciate the presence of others so long as we and they maintain a slight distance of personal sovereignty from other’s reach.
We aren’t just free people moving about our business, we are bubbles of personal authority in which we stand upon our own hallowed ground.
And those bubbles have popped.
Lines in supermarkets are now staggered 6 feet apart and, where the inevitably sprawling line crosses the corridor, one must pass through it to move along one’s business. There is a buffer of 3 feet in either direction, more than we have grown accustomed to allotting ourselves and each other, but the bubble of personal sovereignty no longer provides that we walk on hallowed ground. People’s eyes and body language betray that they resent this as a trespass.
Supermarket aisles are not 6+ feet apart. To pass someone in an aisle, you are at best 3 or 4 feet from that person, and there is an automatic huddling against the shelves as if each of us is entitled to an aisle of our own.
Sidewalks being even narrower, we repel each other upon passing with uncomfortable compulsive half smiles or try to ignore each other entirely to enable denial of the dissolution of hallowed personal space.
We don’t perform the ritual handshake, which is essentially a symbolic trust forged by mutually allowing one another onto our hallowed ground and firmly accepting each other there before stepping back to restore our sovereignty again, the relation to one another permanently changed to some extent.
We don’t hug.
We don’t visit.
We hoard things and don’t share.
We are living in a world 180 degrees from our nature, diametrically opposed to it, the most basic concepts of individuality and societal acceptance, support, and growth as a culture abandoned.
But we do it for the same reasons we have always walked together and gathered together and stood in queues together – protection and order and security.
This is the first time in human history that collectively retreating to the caves is our only possible winning move against a global adversary and everything about it feels wrong.
But it’s working and all we have to do is bide our time and when we step out of those caves again, the one thing programmed in every person’s psyche, no matter how traditionally introverted, subconsciously and automatically, will be to reach out and seek human contact again to wash away this counter-intuitive aberration.
There’s a universal truth. We have all heard it thousands of times. Like a tired cliche, we throw it back and forth as a token gesture, or we aim it as a tool of vengeance, and then forget it as soon as we say it. At best it’s a method of closure, but usually, it’s a meaningless platitude meant to skip critical thought and conversation in preference to small talk.
But it’s a fact of every facet of life right now, consciously and subconsciously.
“You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. “
Firefly Uprising 