I decided that this month I wouldn’t mention Coronavirus (it didn’t take long for me to fail on that count, did it?) because it has dominated so much of the news that I wanted to give you a break from thinking about it. I hadn’t fully grasped how pervasive Covid has become until I tried to come up with a topic for this column that didn’t involve Coronavirus, and I failed. Every topic I thought of somehow came back to the pandemic.
As I said, I wanted to give people a break from Coronavirus because of the negative effects the virus is having on our society. I was about to list some of them, but you are probably as aware of them as I am, and if I did list them I would fail even more spectacularly in my effort to give you a break from thinking about Coronavirus.
The best I can do at this point is to offer an alternative to the bleak news, so below you will find links to videos of Canadian humor. I’m proudly Canadian, and I’m sorry that many of my incredibly talented fellow Canucks haven’t received more attention here. In doing this, I do not want to simply wish Coronavirus away or tell people to cheer up. Neither of those have any place in our current crisis. I simply hope to give people a few minutes to forget their stress and recharge, so that when they return to the stress they have a little more resilience for the challenges they have to face. I can’t solve anyone’s problems, but hopefully I can help them cope with them.
Hopefully these help you find something to smile about.
This article originally appeared in “The Alley,” the newspaper for the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.