My COVID Manifesto…
Well well. Yep. Here we are. Locky 5.0
You know, I had a holiday coming up this very Friday but hey, it’s not my wedding that I have to cancel so it’s ok (still sucks but ok).
It’s so rough isn’t my lovelies! Just devastating. Why us again! Victorians are so rightfully angry at the everything at this point. Imagine if Victorians’ anger was colourful aka Paintball or a Colour Run — what a pretty unicorn parade would cover our streets!
We are rightfully angry at the NSW Govt for allowing this bloody thing back into our state, after we fought so hard to get our lives back. We are angry at home schooling, Bunnings Click & Collect, at the sky, at the world, at the lack of good wine, at Thanos (He was bad y’all)
It’s heartbreaking and absolutely EVERYONE is feeling it. Some of us are clearly suffering badly from a lack of financial support, from the enormous disruption of this. I feel so much for all those casual and gig workers, for small business owners, for our elders trapped in lonely aged care ISO, for the most vulnerable who will feel this so intensely, for frontline workers and stranded Australian citizens — all who are unfairly taken for granted or forgotten in the system.
Now, to the point of my manifesto — the rantings of a highly strung woman that no one asked for…
Many will agree with me, many not — but as a people, can we please start to look further afield than the “Dictator Dan”, “Stop restricting us”, “Set us free” 2020-type, stale conversations? Can we instead be here in 2021, present & accounted for, looking ahead with clear eyes? These days we are all uber Rona-skilled professionals. We now walk this Earth (the 5kms around our home) with swag of new weapons to fight this Covid dumpster fire. We do not need to make it harder for ourselves and everyone else by howling UNFAIR at the lockdown moon?
Lockdowns are an easy target because they suck so much and cause pain immediately but that’s not the whole story is it? There’s more that we need to know, there’s more work to do. If I am preaching to your masked choir right now, please forgive me. I want us ALL finally and clearly appreciate that lockdowns are a necessary evil. We know everyone in the world hates them, and EVERYONE suffers with them BUT they have been proven time & again to save lives. They save critical illness on a large scale.
They save grief on an unimaginable scale. They save people from having the awful long Covid condition. We as a community and as a country still need to fully come to terms with the fact that you simply cannot let Covid run rampant in the community. The results would be disastrous. Businesses small and large would fail on a massive scale. The economy would suffer irreparable damage. People would die en masse and we would get used to that level of death.
We would excuse it by saying those people were old or (in total dystopian horror) — that some of us must die for the good of all of us. I’m sure I’ve seen that movie and it doesn’t end well. The ends justifying the means is a stale, disgusting taste in our mouths that we would never be rid of.
In this Rona-Walking-Dead scenario, life is not normal or okay — life is the very definition of a nightmare — a bad dream from which we can no longer wake or come back from because we were so short sighted.
Life is this instead — no one is going out, no one is engaging non-essential business (especially the entertainment and gig industries) because everyone is afraid, everyone instead stays at home, everyone is sick, no one can work and nothing functions. Hospitals are completely overrun and if your kid gets sick for non-Covid related reasons, it might be too bad, the hospital triage didn’t choose them, it chose someone else to save. People are having to die on a gurney on the street outside a hospital because there are no beds and no staff. We can’t imagine this here can we — because we (dare I say it) stopped the spread with the use of lockdowns.
Watch the world news on any night of the week and covid’s devastation is laid bare — it’s utterly heartbreaking. It is the ashes of what was once life. Lockdowns can help prevent this destruction, especially if moved on quickly! Just look at NSW, learning the freaking hard way, despite having a book of lessons learnt that they could have borrowed from Victoria!
Yep, I hate home schooling, yeah, the pain of this is real. The disruption on our kids — our future generation — is clear. These things will not be fully quantifiable for years or even decades to come.
How will it affect our kids emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially in the long term?
The lockdowns are a disaster for most people and personally, I’m depressed as hell but my fury is not with lockdowns.
If we are angry can we PLEASE put our anger where it belongs –
Like:
WE WOULD NOT BE IN THIS POSITION IF:
• The vaccine rollout had not be been criminally botched and left us utterly exposed to a deadly variant.
• There had been purpose built quarantine facilities like a FUCKING YEAR AGO so covid stops leaking into the community.
• We took care of casual/gig workers properly.
• We took care of frontline workers and essential workers with priority vaccinations
• People in the community stopped being arrogant and did the right thing and wore a damn mask (on your whole face not below your nose!) and if people told to be in ISO stayed THE FUCK at home.
• We didn’t have to beg for financial assistance from the federal government.
• We brought back our stranded Australians from overseas instead of wealthy non-essentials.
• We hadn’t said NO to 40 million Pfizer jabs last July by short sightedness and penny pinching.
• People’s minds weren’t constantly poisoned with Murdoch/intestate journos deliberately dog whistling to people’s justifiable fears who are needing someone/anyone/everyone to blame in this totally unprecedented and terrifying one in 100 year international health crisis.
As Victorians we have suffered so much. We are tired, we are depleted, we feel like giving up, giving in, staying in bed all day, bingeing on anything we can binge on.
We have suffered through new lockdowns every few months, we fear for ourselves, for our loved ones, for our community and for those in our community who are particularly vulnerable.
We have seen it all before. We are both angry at everything but have also come to a place of peace (sometimes in the same minute). We dare to hope for the return of our flow only to have our hopes dashed once again.
This compounded stress is undoubtedly weakening our resilience and flattening our sense of hope and sense of peace. Sure, some days you think, it’s fine, I got this but on other days, it’s seems like it’s just triggering event after triggering event. It goes some way to making it better that we are all feeling it. I’m angry, I’m depressed but I love sharing this experience with family, friends, people who understand moving through days of ugly crying, days of laughing at Jimmy Rees’ latest pearler, and the utter monotony of lockdown
With our support crew, we steel ourselves once again. Let’s deal with this fucking lockdown like the goddamn pros we are, binge watch Lucifer (eye candy alert — get on it stat), drink without regret and give our kids a break when they twist and turn in their Zoom class chairs.
Let’s stop whingeing about why the lockdowns are necessary. Let’s focus on supporting each other just as we are all starting to wane and wobble.
Yes, hold our public leaders accountable — but ALSO praise them when they actually do a good job. Dan Andrews — you have had a hell of a time and you’re still standing, I take my beer hat off to you! Yes you made mistakes, some big ones but you have actually learnt from the mistakes! You are adaptive and willing to learn which is more than most and for that I commend you. Not everyone is with you I know but I for one, thank you for your unswerving civic duty. Thanks for leading a brilliant team who are all professional adults, choosing their words carefully when I’m 100% sure they really just want to scream “shut up poop heads” when asked the EXACT same question 15 different times.
PS Please tell Brett he is a scholar and a gentleman (and hot but that’s beside the point)
So that’s it, that’s the rant. If you made it to the bottom of this without thinking TL;DR — I’m impressed and I thank you.
Surely by 2022 it’ll be back to all good we can take our collective bottles of gin to the park, get drunk in a public place and laugh at the old days and how badly they sucked balls.
Amy out. xoxo
