to watch Anne Frank on tv tonight and think.....

[ImsorryWilson]

there are worse things than pandemics.

Not exactly a novel thought but still.....

Depends on the pandemic surely. Black Death killed 200 million when the planet only had 450 million to begin with....

nochristmabreak-you are exactly what is infuriating about this whole thing. You are coping ok so fuck everyone else. Other people in the world have it harder, so everyone needs to just shut the fuck up.

you have absolutely no idea what is going on is anybody else's life , you don't know if i have lost anybody, you don't know what my-or anybody else's life is like. You know what YOUR life is like and you use that to judge everybody else .

[quote Nochristmasbreak]@lockedownloretta you are loving a bit of exaggeration aren't you?

children can't go to school. --- they have been in school sep-December it's been 3 weeks!

families haven't seen each other for months and months and months. ---
Why?? We have been in this lockdown for three weeks, why haven't you seen your family? When it wasn't lockdown? Popped round to their garden or through the window, or dropped off their shopping or gone for a walk?

This is not as bad as the holocaust, or being in a war torn country, or being a refugee, or prisoner or war, which is what this thread is about, perspective from looking at what Anne Frank went through. [/quote]
👏👏

@pickyomix

Fucking yawn! I think it's ok to find this stuff hard, intolerable even, whilst knowing many others have and do have it harder.

You could have made your point without being so rude at the beginning.

It's always good to be able to put your troubles into perspective. That doesn't mean people shouldn't bottle up their more trivial hardships and not ask for help, shouldn't feel it's ok not to be ok etc.

So the extra dead women and sexually abused children...

No one's said anything to this.

Not everyone is sitting around watching Netflix fgs.

QueenoftheAir

I always think of the time of the Black Death rampaging across Europe. And what it must have felt like , not to know why your whole village is just wiped out.”

Indeed, if we all just paused for a moment and thought about that. 50% - 50%! - of the population died.

We have the benefit of modern science. If we can all just be patient for a few more months, we’ll mostly all be free of this.

I'd like to know what channel this was on, please.

Yanbu, OP, of course. I previously worked with young people who had been through unimaginable horrors. It's not a hardship competition, of course, but that experience does help me to keep my own challenges in perspective.

I'm sorry but it's wrong to make people feel like they should be grateful for the situation we are currently in. Of course there are worse things and there always will be. Doesn't mean this is ok though. To the pp, as an adult, it's not too much of a hardship to watch Netflix, as long as the bills are still being paid somehow. For children it's unnatural. In some cases they are being deprived of their natural development and education. My one year old nephew screamed in terror when the gas man came to fix the boiler as he had never remembered a stranger in his house before. Wouldn't come to any of his extended family in the summer (they are not local to any of us), really clingy to his parents. Six months on and he is once again not seeing anyone except his parents and siblings. He's just one of many being deprived of normal social development and I worry that it is storing up trouble for the country as a whole.

I'd like to know what channel this was on, please.

A couple of people have mentioned the iplayer so I'm assuming BBC.

Thank you DramaAlpaca. Missed the references to iPlayer.

A one year old is often clingy to their parents!

Think we need to be careful not to project our fears onto innocuous situations

@herethereandeverywhere

I don't understand the purpose of your post.

Are you suggesting that it's not possible for people to be struggling and feeling quite desperate because the pandemic isn't as bad as the Holocaust?

Or that if only people realised the pandemic is not as bad as the Holocaust that they would stop feeling bad? Or that perhaps pointing that out is all the help they need to snap them out of their thinking (or indeed shut them up)?

I don't think anyone would dispute that the Holocaust was one of the worst things to ever happen to mankind - in large part because it was inflicted by fellow man.

I'm just not sure how that makes any difference to people who are struggling. Are you suggesting that mental health and social support can largely be replaced by telling people to just get on with it because The Holocaust was worse?! I actually find that offensive on multiple levels.

I doubt the ok is saying any of these things. I imagine !like many people.she is struggling and after watching the Anne Frank programme is wandering how people coped in conditions that are objectively much than hers are. And there is no doubt that Anne Frank's family suffered from a far worse situation than what the vast majority of people in this country are having to cope with.

That does not mean the suffering of people here and now is not real and serious. It is perfectly possibly to suffer badly and to feel ( rightly) hard done by, while at the same time wondering how others out up.with worse. Some people.find comfort or.perspective from that.

There is a difference between using this perspective to .make yourself feel better and telling someone else that they should.count themselves lucky because ' things could be worse' The first is.fine if it works to make you feel a bit better, the latter is not OK

@ilovesooty you know what, I really couldn't. I'm so bored of this crap. 'People lived through worse in WW2, this is nothing' etc etc

It's all over Facebook and here and all it does is make people feel rubbish for not coping.

I'd rather not add to that or encourage it. It's widely recognised that actually this sort of thing is damaging and not helpful.

@Nochristmasbreak

Yes
YOU are the most annoying thing about the pandemic

Well, yes, of course there are worse things than this pandemic. But I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have wanted to be around for the Black Death.

In a thread about Anne Frank, the Holocaust and War you have posted about yourself. I should imagine the reason you are struggling is because you are self centred/self focused with a lack of perspective about the wider world and suffering.

Sorry, but this is awful. This isn’t just a thread about Anne Frank - it is about the pandemic. And some people are genuinely struggling. It’s not struggling Top Trumps. Give people a break for Christ’s sake.

[quote Nochristmasbreak]@lockedownloretta So if your mum lives 3 hours away you don't see her regularly anyway do you? And probably rely on phone calls and video chats to keep in contact, so how is this any different??

We can all feel a bit bored, but it's the exaggeration that is getting ridiculous.

A sense of perspective helps to get through times like this. It's one thing if you have lost a close loved one to covid. But the general whining because you haven't been able to go to a restaurant or have to wear a mask, or haven't seen 5 friends all at the same time, or I have to support my child with home learning, shows what little sense of perspective people have.

If your friends and family are alive you are lucky.
If you are in a warm house you are lucky
If you have eaten today you are lucky

Anne Frank, Syrian refugees, people living in slums in India, aids ridden children in orphanages in Africa have it worse than us sitting in watching bloody Netflix.

[/quote]
How can you put not being able to see 5 friends at a time in the same bracket as homeschooling? Do you have children and a full time job to juggle? That’s not a minor inconvenience, it’s a fucking struggle every day for both parent and child.

Reading your post, I hope you never complain about anything. Ever. You would be supremely hypocritical to do so.

And FYI. Not everyone can afford Netflix. Your privilege is showing.

I also think of the plague and how people then must have felt that life would never get back to normal or move forwards

@Wolfiefan I wonder what it must have felt like, to see the effects from a silent invisible killing disease, with no press, or television, very very slow communications (fastest humans could travel - galloping horse or fast run before the wind on a boat). The not knowing, and the feeling that somehow it was a punishment visited on you by an unknown presence.

My reflections on the historical experiences of restriction, global threat and fear, and privation have partly been prompted by working with young 20-something undergrads (100s of them at the moment). They have few (if any) ways of gaining perspective on their current situation. Their current feelings of fear mixed with frustration are being visited on us, the people teaching them, in a way which is understandable, but also increasingly unacceptable.

It makes me reflect on the luxury in which we post-WWII generations have been raised. Even then, I can remember moments in the late 70s & early 80s, when the Cold War was being whipped up again, when we were given civil defence training about responding to the nuclear alert. There was one day when the news carried reports of the USSR and China doing a face-off along a shared border - I did wonder whether we were going to see Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) - I remember Reagan ...

For this current generation of 20-somethings, this is probably the first time they've faced a national & international situation of threat. It does lead one to value the "ordinary" things as privileges & luxuries.

It's a sense of perspective, not a hierarchy of suffering. Just putting things in perspective - for many people, this can help the ordinary stresses of this situation. Yes there are mental health challenges at the moment, but for most of us, these are normal challenges - it's just that most of us haven't been tested or challenged in this way before.

NB: I say 'most' not 'all.'

But the general whining because you haven't been able to go to a restaurant or have to wear a mask

It’s the inability to see that these are huge impositions on our daily freedoms and have a massive impact on state of mind that irritates me.

OP I agree - I’ve found it helpful to reflect on what my refugee grandmother went through and how she dealt with it. Her example of relentless hard work and putting a cheerful face on for the family is something I’m trying to copy.

I’m not suggesting that anyone else could or should do this. I’m saying that I’ve found it helps me, to reflect on her life and how she dealt with hard times.

I voted yabu because I think all these war and holocaust comparisons are in really poor taste and I'm sick of seeing it.

@ImsorryWilson

there are worse things than pandemics.

Not exactly a novel thought but still.....

Yes, we'd had a bad day in our house yesterday and my DD said exactly that to me

@Notashandyta I realise that. I have 3 DCs and several DNs and remember the separation anxiety stage. I wouldn't have commented on that as what my DN and his parents have experienced is not normal clinginess, he has been actually scared of people going to his house and when visiting others. It is an issue.