I am getting a bit tired of all those well-meaning people out there – though I don’t doubt their good intent – who seem hell-bent on ‘keeping me safe’.
‘It’s alright’! … ‘Don’t panic’! … ‘We are keeping you safe’!
If ever there is a better way to engender uncertainty than to be bombarded with that constant message, tell me – for it immediately conveys the gnawing doubt that we must be constantly at risk and unsafe – else why do we need to be constantly kept safe? … and from what, I am led to wonder.
Emergency messages just keep coming… and coming.
Damaging winds here … sheep weather alerts there … brown rot [OMG: another sheep emergency – indeed I now even dream of sheep, brown from head to toe as they mire and moulder under a blanket of marauding mushrooms … poor little blighters].
Alerts for this, alerts about that … fire emergencies hither and thither … a house fire 25 km up the coast [wild-eyed, I rush out to check my chimney] … wine is bad for me … shellfish may galvanise my gout … storm, tempest, and heatwave … a meteor may strike me dead as I walk to get the morning paper [um: should I risk the walk?] … walk more, or your legs will atrophy … don’t climb this, don’t enter there … danger, danger, danger everywhere … all marked by yellowing tape and wind-torn signs.
Yet, so recurrent are the warnings that, numbed with anxiety, the ‘keep-safers‘ risk engendering complacency and ‘warning fatigue’ in those they seek ‘to keep safe’, as each ‘mother of all emergencies’ passes, mostly without great harm.
Now, dangling above us like the Sword of Damocles is the Godzilla of all dangers … the virus! The virus is everywhere: at exposure site ‘x’, contact risk ‘y’, football stadium ‘z’ … do not touch that ball! My goodness, it may even be lurking in the poo pipes that run under my front drive.
And, as if to tease and taunt us, there are those new harbingers of doom … ‘the cases’. Cases scowl at us from our left, they snigger at us on our right, they encircle us and threaten our every unprotected breath.
But… thank you, thank you, for keeping me warned. While now just a shade on edge, at least I am being kept safe. And I am so glad that you have my back – especially in the never-ending crises through which I now must try to live – for it seems that I haven’t a snowflakes chance in hell of pulling through on my own!
[Uh-Oh: a news flash as I type his] … ‘pregnancy is now a risk factor for heart disease‘! Sorry, mum … is it too late to reverse-engineer my conception?
As I process this latest threat, I thank my lucky stars … please, stars, don’t go out… that I am a non-chest-feeding, cis-gendered, male-person! That is at least one reassurance.
You may think me ungrateful – I am not – but I am ‘a bit over it all’. But… to the point of this diatribe, this rail against stupidity…
Life can dish up some monumental ironies – and this next one is a doozie! For just when it seemed that ‘Big Brother Protection Services’ had all threats completely covered on our behalf – along came ‘the virus’. After all the pre-conditioning, all the cocooning, all the safeguarding that has been inbuilt to warn of every threat … to ‘keep us safe’… finally, a true global disaster [the virus] has stimulated a truly scintillating global scientific protection effort [the vaccines] that can bury this threat of all threats. Vaccination.
The one thing we all really need… the one thing that should be our essential personal contribution to collective safety… and suddenly we are told:
Vaccination? … make up your own mind, make your own decision. Vaccination? … ignore your collective responsibility and to hell with the safety of the population at large… it’s optional!
When the one thing comes along that truly matters; that will truly keep us safe from an honest to goodness, once in a lifetime, global threat; that will truly return the freedoms we have all sacrificed… it’s optional? … Over to you, bud! Make your own decision’.
Though whole-of-population vaccination will directly save countless lives, restore the economy, keep people employed, and revive travel, it’s … ‘we’ll leave this one to you to choose. We think it’s a good thing to consider but, hey, make up your own mind‘.
As for keeping us safe. Suddenly it’s discretionary. Ye gods!
This has been the one moment in our lifetime when leaders could have/should have led; the one moment when the heavy hand of government could have/should have over-ridden the shrill anti-vaxer voices with: ‘roll up your sleeve, here’s your shot, take it’; the one moment when the shilly-shallying of democracy might have been better served by [almost] a collective communism.
But no!… our leaders have coyly demurred and have fluffed it. Having so efficiently kept me safe from a slew of lesser threats, when the safety chips were down, the brave voice of ‘you must’ has not been heard.
Breathless cub-reporters, hardly yet wet behind the ears, peddle their own ‘[in]expert’ opinion – as if they know! They miss the point that – no, none ‘knew’, and we have had to learn and adjust as we have gained knowledge and experience. That is how progress happens.
Second-guessed, aided, and abetted by a sensationalist, doubt-sowing media, our various governments have prevaricated, dodged, and weaved – not, mind you, from laying down draconian defensive restrictions, just from a single-focus insistence on the cure.
Lockdown; quarantine; restrict; cage; breech – catch words to replace the one positive word that might save us from ourselves. Vaccinate.
We have been led by innuendo and apprehension when we desperately need to hear a single, strong, and certain voice!
Well, I won’t beat about the bush. Go…get…your…shot!
The risks have been grossly misrepresented, and scurrilously exaggerated. The benefits have been woefully under-emphasised, and wilfully ignored.
Borrowing the Nike ad and applying it to any of and all the vaccines … ‘take one for humanity – just do it’.
John Agar
