WTF is happening to the human race? A rant

I haven't had a good rant for a while. Today's the day.

WTF is happening to the human race? Where did the love go? Why, all of a sudden, is an "I'm all right Jack" attitude pervading every aspect of life, from shopping to travelling to working and touching?

During the recent bushfire catastrophe there was such an outpouring of love from those who hadn't burned, to those who had. What happened to that?

Millions upon millions of dollars were donated by people around the world. People cared. Food, clothing, bedding, all sorts of goodies poured into fire-affected towns, burying us in mountains of love and "Licorice Bullets" (it's true - those chocolate treats turned up in Mallacoota by the pallet load) ... We saw the birth of the Empty Esky movement and the roads reopened and people who hadn't burned visited towns that had, to spend money there and help boost the devastated economies of fire-ravaged towns.

Ah - my furiously-turning cogs are seeing the common denominator. I think I get it now.

During the catastrophic fires there were 2 very distinct groups of humans: those who hadn't burned and those who had. A Helper group and a Helpee group. An "Us" and "Them" (this is something we humans do a lot). Or, pardon my cynicism, a group that could feel virtuous about their "altruism", and a group that should be grateful to be the beneficiaries of that "altruism". (Here's a hint, people - that's not real altruism.)

With the advent of COVID-19 that division has disappeared, my friends, and that is what has changed:

All of a sudden we've all been dropped into this toilet together and some people believe they have more right to the toilet paper than everybody else.

News footage of Aussies returning home last night - the final flights before the closing of our borders - showed people arriving from overseas destinations and being hugged and kissed by those meeting them at the airport. I'm hoping their next destination was wherever the traveller had to go for their 14 days of self-isolation - and I hope their happy huggy greeters went with them to isolate themselves as well, rather than dropping them off and heading out to the shops to pick up extra supplies.

These overwhelmingly younger people so easily and thoughtlessly abandoned current social-distancing principles - making an exception for people returning from overseas, FFS. Oh, that's right - there's this belief that young people will only get a mild dose of COVID-19, if they get it, so they're not afraid of catching it. Has it not occurred to them that they are very capable of SPREADING it to those who may not be as young or healthy as they are? Evidently not.

Don't get me started (oops, too late!) on those alleged busloads of city-folk who have been raiding the supermarkets of small country towns - because evidently, once they have stripped everything from their own city shelves, they have some sense that they are entitled to strip ours as well. Not only are they leaving remote places without supplies - they risk bringing whatever germs they may have to remote places.

Especially insidious are those who are trying to justify their selfishness by clothing it in Empty Esky virtuousness and self-congratulation. "I just spent $426 at your supermarket. Yeah, I'm helping you recover from the bushfires by buying up all your supplies - aren't I great?"

As for those who have hooked up their caravans and headed en masse to places like Lakes Entrance and Mallacoota - because we have had, as yet, no cases of COVID-19 in East Gippsland - their stupidity and selfishness know no bounds. A single case of COVID-19 in the holiday park here will spread like the fire we had at New Year. I shudder to think of the shared amenities blocks and the soup of pestilence that could be cultivated in them - or the way our already stretched health services will collapse under the increased burden of a COVID-19 outbreak here. Or the way that our high number of vulnerable, elderly or immune-suppressed local people will be affected.

Nationally, of course, teachers, once again, are losers - from comments made by our sloganising PM that suggest they are still viewed largely as babysitters, they are being expected to keep the streets safe from allegedly COVID-carrying children. Fuck what happens to teachers in the classrooms or playgrounds of the nation - as long as the rest of the country doesn't have to be responsible for keeping the young occupied and at bay for 6 or so hours a day. As an ex-teacher, I'm disgusted. Once again, the government fails to support teachers. (On the plus side, I have seen comments from parents who are sensibly schooling their kids from home, that "teachers should be paid a billion dollars! This is harder than I thought." Imagine doing that with thirty of the little darlings all day every day, love, not just your own tiny tribe...)

Last weekend I developed a foul headache, and by Monday afternoon I had a scratchy sore throat and a cough. I imagine it's something I caught from local children, who've had some kind of unidentified lurgy go through the kinder and school like a dose of Epsom Salts. As far as I'm concerned, just now, any bug is suspect - and a large number of our library patrons are elderly - so I put myself into isolation. Since then I've realised, after observinging the behaviour of so many human beings in the media & social media that we are clearly approaching this pandemic from very different places.

What a lot of people seem to be forgetting is that we are ALL in this together. Every single one of us has a responsibility to OUR COMMUNITY as well as ourselves. It's really what we should be thinking at any time we get a communicable illness, not just at a time where so many lives are at risk from something virulent that we have no immunity to and no cure or vaccine for.

In these COVID-19 times:
Don't think to yourself "I'm young, so it won't affect me. It doesn't matter. Business as usual."
Don't think to yourself "by running to a remote town I can outrun the virus and keep myself safe"
Don't think to yourself "the government will save us".

Don't behave only as if you don't want to catch COVID-19 - behave as if you don't want to spread it.

Repeat after me:

 It's not all about me. 

I am a part of the universe, not the centre of it. 

Oh - and keep your distance. Stay well, friends.

2020: the year of catastrophe

What a shit-storm 2020 is turning out to be!

We saw in the New Year in smoke and ashes, flames having licked away the landscape. Catastrophic fires, the likes of which Australia has never seen, gobbled and howled their way down the east coast of Australia, spitting out broken houses and towns as they went, turning livelihoods and economies to charcoal, incinerating wildlife in unimaginable numbers.

For week after week after choking week, major Australian cities were cloaked in thick smoke that stung the eyes, seared the lungs and set off smoke alarms inside office blocks. The pall circumnavigated the globe. It turned NZ glaciers a dirty brown and the blood-red ball that was the sun, rising and setting over a black and grey landscape, drove some people to the brink.

And then, hard on its heels, flooding rain that washed ash into the waterways, poisoning and choking life that had survived the fires, and storms that took off roofs, and hail the size of tennis balls that smashed windscreens.

And then – simmering away in the background while we dealt with all the shit that Nature could dish out – from a country far away came The Pandemic - COVID 19. At first it crept in, on planes and cruise ships, while governments prevaricated, pointed fingers, sat on their hands, told everyone to calm down, nothing to see here. Then they screened, isolated and quarantined, and finally legislated, and one by one the lights went out.

Lockdown in Italy. European borders closed. Extreme measures. Sadly, too late to halt the exponential spread of the sickness in places where the health of the economy was deemed to be more important than the health of citizens. One anonymous PM, whom I shall call the Evil Overlord, decided on Friday that mass gatherings of more than 500 people would be banned from Monday – when his happy clappy Hillsong conference (3000 attendees in Sydney, Australia) would be over. On Friday he had vowed to go “to the footy” on the weekend, to show there was no need to worry about the virus. The Friday afternoon diagnosis of COVID 19 in one of his close cabinet colleagues dashed his footy plans, but the Evil Overlord did not put himself into quarantine, the way he required the contacts of other COVID 19 victims to do. Another example, in glorious living hypocritical colour, of the two sets of rules he has - one for us and one for himself and his ilk…

Image source: Twitter

For several years now, scientists have been warning that the world is ripe for a pandemic. Just more science for governments to under-react to.  Sure, they’ve developed Pandemic Response plans – but they’ve waited rather a long time, during this pandemic, to enact anything that seems like a serious response.

Our particular evil overlord, who ignores Science (and common sense, many would agree), is one of the villains of the disaster movie that is 2020. There are others like him in some other powerful  nations – those who will always choose the interests of the rich over the rationality and common sense of science and the evidence of their own eyes. 

There’s a photo that’s been doing the rounds of the internet for quite some time – a young woman is holding up a placard that says “at the start of every disaster movie, there’s a scientist being ignored”.

That’s the disaster movie we’re living in the middle of right now – there’s no end in sight, and no sign of Bruce Willis. Fuck.