Early on in March 2020 I was leery of the hysteria surrounding Covid and decided my course of action was to be wait and see. At the time I was under the impression that I was a freeborn citizen with a number of unalienable rights, including sovereignty over my bodily choices.
So when the talk started about new vaccines being imminent, I again decided I would wait and see whether the vaccines were all they were cracked up to be. This was then, and is now, an entirely reasonable position to take, screeching from media and Twitter hounds notwithstanding. I didn’t expect it would turn out to be more like “wait and see how totally out of hand this will get.”
- Wait and see how the government will forcibly close businesses
- Wait and see how treatments will be suppressed
- Wait and see how hysteria captured the media
- Wait and see how healthy populations will be subject to house arrest
- Wait and see how police will shoot protesters
- Wait and see how a pregnant mother will be arrested for a Facebook post
- Wait and see how medical services across state borders will be denied
- Wait and see how ‘wait and see-ers’ will be demonized
- Wait and see how family and friends will betray their loved ones
Well, I’ve waited long enough and I’ve seen more than enough. Thankfully the worst, most violent excesses have abated for now, if you exclude the ongoing carnage of short and long-term vaccine injury. There are lingering abominations from the blitzkrieg of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, but generally there is a sense that an uneasy peace, or maybe a phoney war, has descended on us.
Of course, there is still a serious amount of Covid pantomime going on.
Exhibit A: a TV news report recently showed a road accident victim doing rehab with a mask on, then happily chatting without a mask to the reporter, also without a mask. If he was worried about Covid he’d leave it on for the interview, or if he wasn’t worried he wouldn’t wear it while doing rehab. Seems you can have it both ways these days provided you don’t think about it too much.
Exhibit B: Last year cricket teams in the BBL were decimated if one of the players had a positive test, and others were ‘close contacts.’ Umpires refused to hold a bowler’s cap or sunglasses for fear of the spicy cough. Last night, two players on one team played despite not only testing positive, but also feeling unwell. If there is no practical change when a player has Covid, why do we need to know about it?
Answer: we don’t, but it has become normalised to disclose players’ private health statuses, just as it is normalised now to ask anyone any kind of detailed personal health question that satiates the questioner’s ghoulish fetishes. While player fitness has always been a matter of interest to sports fans, especially those who like a bet, illness used to be dealt with in a formulaic way, such as “Player X is not playing tonight due to illness.” There’s no need to know any further details.
Exhibit C: The memorial concert for aboriginal singer Archie Roach included a pre-concert ‘smoking ceremony’ in which footage aired for a news report showed a woman dancing through the ceremonial smoke – while wearing a mask. This example is probably less deliberate pantomime and more genuine irrationality. Anyone donning a mask and expecting to keep a virus out but let smoke in has taken leave of their rationality. Ironically, in this case...
