Gabby Baker
I wonder what has happened to our people. Where is the kindness? Where is the acceptance of people’s personal choices?
It seems to me that it has been replaced by hysteria about vaccination status, and fear.
It has reached the point where we are prepared to exclude members of our society from participating in it – on the basis that they have made a decision to decline to be vaccinated against Covid 19.
We are prepared to say to our students that they are unable to study at our universities, that they are unable to partake in sport at school or to participate in many other school activities.
We are prepared to exclude ratepayers from accessing the facilities that their rates have helped to provide.
We are even prepared to say that we don’t want “Aucklanders” to visit for a summer vacation, and we are allowing “checkpoints” to be established by local iwi so that they can tell us who is allowed to travel and who is not.
We are prepared to deny thousands of lawful citizens of this country the opportunity to return – to re-connect with families, to be with dying relatives, to attend meaningful family celebrations.
We have accepted that they must enter a “lottery” to secure a chance to spend $3,000 and up to two weeks in a stringent quarantine regime – in hotels that were not designed nor fit for this purpose.
So how did we get here?
Back in March 2020 when the country was placed into its first ”lockdown” it seemed that there was a united effort to minimise the impact of Covid in our community.
However, it soon became apparent that the government was “in control” and was relishing the chance to control the lives of citizens.
We had the graduated Level System – with Level 4 being the most strict in the world. Guidelines were set out – with parameters about what the criteria were for each level. However these parameters were never really followed – and it was the decision of the Cabinet that determined the level of freedom that people could enjoy.
It was at this time that we saw the signs of a changed society – panic buying at the supermarket with no thought for anyone else. There were shortages of all sorts of essential items – and who knows what people did with all that toilet paper? The point is that people were already showing that it was a “dog eat dog” world and that they didn’t really care about the old lady who couldn’t buy food.
Then the vaccine became available and New Zealand supposedly secured millions of doses. Trouble was that there wasn’t enough to go round so there had to be a graduated rollout to slow the process down and try to keep up with the intermittent supply chain.
Here is where another indication of our changed behaviour occurred.
When it was obvious that the majority of the population were not going to be vaccinated before the end of 2021 – but that “vulnerable” people could jump the queue – thousands of people did just that.
They weren’t prepared to wait until it became their ‘turn’ in the inordinately slow vaccine rollout. They felt entitled to get ahead of the masses – and there were any number of nebulous “vulnerabilities” that let them push ahead of the general population.
And so it continued….
And now we have a significant portion of the population who have been “fully vaccinated” and who – along with the government – feel that discriminating against their fellow New Zealanders is okay.
Regardless of whether or not we believe vaccination will prevent us from contracting or spreading the virus, we need to be mindful that in our society there are all kinds of people with all sorts of beliefs. We may not agree with many of them – but as a society, we respect an individual’s right to hold a particular view, practise a certain religion and so on.
There are people who are obese, yet we treat them in our hospitals without question. There are people who use drugs and require medical care because of it. There are people who choose not to be vaccinated for measles, meningococcal disease, mumps and so on.
We do not prevent these people from participating in our society and we do not limit their freedoms.
So why do we find it so easy to label those who choose not to be vaccinated against Covid 19 and treat them so differently?
And what has changed in a week – so that last Thursday an unvaccinated person was able to walk into their local library but on Friday they couldn’t?
What happened that made the risk to our society so much greater?
It is a sad indictment on us as New Zealanders and as a country that we have become hostile and divisive and that the government is encouraging us to be this way.
We had a catch-cry after the mosque attacks in Christchurch – “This is not who we are….”
I would love to know what has happened to that.
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