Reminds Citizens They are not Alone During National Moment of Stress and Emotion
VIDEO of the Governor’s remarks is available on YouTube here
“We talk about this as a government response. The federal government is doing this. The state government is doing this. Government, government, government. This manifests on a number of levels and the government response is obviously very important.
But the impact I think is greater and probably greatest as a social phenomenon and on people and on families. This is tremendously disruptive on all sorts of levels. It came out of the blue. For me, in New York, it reminds me of 9/11 where one moment, which was inconceivable, just changed everything, changed your perspective on the world, changed your perspective on safety. Children who were young at that time, but of school age, watched on TV. They did not know if their parents were coming home. I think it changed their whole outlook on life after 9/11.
This is a situation like that. It is obviously a totally different magnitude, but it’s like that, it’s a moment that just changes your whole life. Yesterday, you were going to work and you were going to go to the office party. Today, you are at home and the kids are at home. You are worried about health, you are worried about your job and you are worried about economics. And you are dealing with personal issues and you are dealing with family issues – and it is all happening at once. Then you turn on the TV and there is all this different information and nobody can tell you this is going to be 30 days or 60 days or 4 months, 5 months, 9 months.
The stress, the emotion, is just incredible, and rightfully so. It is a situation that is one of the most disruptive that I have seen, and it will change almost everything going forward. It will. That is a fact. It’s not your perception. It’s not just you. It’s all of us and it’s true and it’s real. Nobody can tell you when this is going to end. Nobody can tell you. I talked to all the experts. Nobody can say two months, four months, nine months – nobody.
It’s hard living your life with that big a question mark out there. Nobody can tell you when you’ll go back to work. People can tell you that it’s not just you economically. It’s everyone. Take comfort in that federal government is actually acting on an economic package. But it’s true, having your family all together is a beautiful thing. It’s also different for a lot of people, especially for a prolonged period of time.
So these are major shifts in life and in the most emotional, stressful conditions that you can imagine and I think my own personal advice is understand it for what it is and that it’s not just you. It has changed everything and it will for the foreseeable future and think through how you’re going to deal with it and what it means and even try to find a positive in it, right?
It’s a very negative circumstance but you’re going to have time on your hands. You’re going to have time with your family. You’re going to have time at home in this busy hurry-up world, all of a sudden somebody said you have a couple of months where you’re going to be home with the family, no work, you work from home, but it’s a totally different situation. How do you use that? How do you adjust? It’s not going to be done overnight but it is something that everybody has to think through.
