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.