KSK
I’m not quite sure how I felt about the insurgents who infiltrated Northland being chased down to own up to their transgressions and end their continued silence. It felt like the entire country was baying for their blood. It seems an appalling state of affairs that there was a political call for public naming and shaming. We may as well have called for the utmost humiliation by bringing back the stocks and getting in supplies of rotten eggs and soft tomatoes, the better for biffing at them.
It was a situation that, of course, has happened previously. The Wanaka couple are now doubtless regretting their actions, but it will happen again. There is plenty of anecdotal scuttlebutt of people making cross-border trips unexempted or with manufactured reasons.
The two foolish Northland day-trippers and their essential work are only part of the story. The paradox of the large tangi that well exceeded allowed numbers in level 2 was reported side-by-side and with breathless MSM updates of the Northland miscreants, yet where was the condemnation of that predominantly gang gathering or an outcry demanding immediate retribution and arrest? There was one a week ago for Bishop Brian Tamaki. He is now before the courts, yet when hypocrites Dr Wiles and Dr Gaston were outed on The BFD breaking level 4 rules, not only did nothing happen: their actions were defended by both the PM and the Director-General of Health!
I am not a supporter of lockdowns, given that there is plenty of information from other countries now showing that they are ineffective.
Because the rules are so many and varied, with ever-changing steps and stages, and because lockdowns are costing people their livelihoods, the public quite reasonably have had enough.
The government justifies continuing lockdowns with the claim that they are to give them time to vaccinate the majority of us with a vaccine that offers questionable protection, divides us as a country into the vaxxed and un-vaxxed, causes division within families and now, with its introduction of mandates, attempts to override our protection from the Bill of Rights.
There is no clear target that is enough for the government and its agents, who change their minds faster than a cranky two-year-old. Our rights have been wholly overridden despite earlier and vehement assurances that this would not be the case. We are living in a distorted reality. There is so much fear-mongering and panic that all reason and commonsense seems to have disappeared, along with our rights.
The recovery rate of Covid and its highly infectious but less deadly Delta variant is high. Many people recover. Some don’t. Some sadly die. But we have become, through these many Covid months, death-deniers. We forget that life means death. It is an inescapable conclusion.
We may suffer from debilitating illnesses; we may have horrible, awful things happen to us. Sometimes medical science pulls us back, but we will likely experience after-shocks. Sometimes we succumb earlier than we would choose. We cannot escape death. But what we have done with Covid is to make it the only reason for death, and it must be tightly controlled, stamped out, eliminated, eradicated. It is a rationale that is crippling the country in every way.
And yet the government and their panic-merchants continue to peddle their wares, and many willingly buy them. We are in a lose-lose downwards spiral.