J M White
The two-pronged media attack on truth has been more than many people can cope with and it isn’t finished yet. Soon, anyone who disobeys the merest government directive, edict or mandate will find themselves outlaws – even though these things are not technically laws.
Actually, I don’t know any longer what the law is to be on the wrong side of. To be potentially jailable. With a rap sheet.
I worry it might happen to me.
Without doing anything different, I have moved countries. Born and brought up in New Zealand, now I suddenly find I am living in a place called Aotearoa. I don’t remember moving and I can’t find it on the map.
I thought I had a reasonable command of the language I was taught, in which all of my legal certificates are written and which I speak every day, but now I suddenly find it contains a vocabulary I don’t understand and I wonder what it means – are they talking about me?
I am too frightened to have a cigarette. That’s another thing, a little comfort I have lived with and thought nothing of for decades but now it has been criminalised. Well, at least certain areas for its use have been. And I’m not sure where they are.
Perhaps it is as well I can’t speak the language any more, because it would surely lead me into trouble. Expressing an opinion is another thing that could land me in jail. Homophobia for instance. I have three fully-fledged phobias, collected unknowingly during my careless life, but homophobia isn’t one of them. Or I didn’t think it was. Phobias are things you KNOW about. But certain words can now be translated as homophobic, I am told, so I could have a fourth phobia, and having a phobia I don’t know about is more terrifying than the ones I do know about.
TERF? I tried to find out what that means. I’m still not sure, but apparently, that doesn’t matter. I can still be one. I don’t even have to do or say anything. I can just think like one and I’m in trouble. I’m not sure with whom and I have yet to discover how on earth one KNOWS if I think TERFy thoughts if I don’t even know what they are or if I am thinking them myself.
Then after following just about every other mandate or by-law introduced daily now, or at least the ones I know about – after doing up my seatbelt in a car/wearing a helmet while riding a bicycle/not smoking in public places or cars or somewhere else/wearing two masks in case I take one off by accident or if I forget where I am/scanning when I arrive/scanning when I leave/not spitting on the footpath/and injecting myself and my children up the wazoo with an experimental mRNA serum which has had no long term studies completed – I worry.
I could still find myself bewildered by something new in the new vocabulary, or guilty of a minor infringement if someone catches me thinking a bad thought, or of forgetting some new diktat that arrived when my phone battery was flat. And any one of these things could potentially put me unknowingly On the Wrong Side of the Law. And perhaps in jail.
I worry all the time that my slavish obedience will not get my normal life back. Silly me. Did I really think it would? Wasn’t there always that nagging little suspicion in the back of my mind that I wasn’t doing enough? That my place in the team of 5 million wasn’t fully deserved? I try so hard. I am firm with people I see disobeying the rules, putting others at risk, not keeping themselves safe. They are not grateful. I don’t know what else I can do to bring back the Old Normal. I miss it so much.
Should I give blood? Or drink it? Would the headaches go away then?
I feel so worried all the time and I don’t know why.
No, I’m not coping well. Not well at all.