In Australia we are living in ominous times, as we witness the regression of our freedom and civil liberties. We are observing a societal transformation with an increasing loss of individual rights; rights that once lost will be hard to regain!
I never thought I’d witness a time when millions of Australians would be placed in, what feels like ‘house arrest’, with police and the Army patrolling the streets to enforce COVID lock down and curfews.
For months we have watched fear peddling Governments, advocating wholesale anxiety and stress with enforced shut downs, perpetrated by ‘risk adverse’ medical professionals; whose once good standing in the community is a front to conceal indecisive and incompetent politicians.
With politicians shrinking into the shadows to abrogate responsibility, it is the unelected health ‘experts’ who now sit in the political driver’s seat. Remember, these are the same privileged self-aggrandizing authoritarians who wanted to ban … of all things … ‘soft drinks’, long before the claims of ‘reverse racism’ were successfully crafted against soda manufacturers; courtesy of ‘identity politics’, ‘virtue signalling’ and ‘woke correctness’. I digress!
We are witnessing the political elite (earning large guaranteed incomes) forcing the working class further into poverty as a result of lock downs. Small businesses have been sent into bankruptcy, with an inability to rebuild; left with the weight of residual debts and no assets. The lower socioeconomic class are the biggest losers, struggling to survive and enduring incredible adverse health and economic suffering. Meanwhile many multi-national corporations are permitted to continue trading.
Also excluded from the ‘cost’ of lock down is the devastating effect on mental health and the associated increased rates of suicide; the young, the isolated and the elderly. What of the long-term educational ‘opportunity losses’, caused by school closures and the harmful impact that has on our children’s welfare and future; the social, health and economic toll?
These considerations should be included in the lock down cost/benefit analysis, before imposing house arrest and harsh restrictions which have cause to produce mortality rates, far greater than the COVID pandemic itself. Interestingly, those making these decisions are not suffering any losses, as they measure their pecuniary advantage in political currency.
We have thousands of people in quarantine with a small percentage COVID positive. The reality is there are very few COVID patients hospitalized in some large ‘highly vaccinated’ territories, where mortality rate are lower than that caused by the flu season. I think it’s time politicians started considering ALL the costs of lock down, not just medical statistics like infection rates.
Meanwhile we witness disputes over closed State borders and demonstrators arrested after enduring tear gas and rubber bullets. While I accept that these events attract the prerequisite anarchists, many protesters are just ‘hard working’ Australians seeking to protect their livelihoods; those who stand to lose everything as a result of freedom lost; … yet they are ALL labeled ‘boofheads’ by the arrogant political elite.
Fortunately, we have the media to remind us that ‘we are all in this together’! Whats going on; there’s got to be a better way?
24 August 2021
“How much of human life is lost in waiting.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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