Well, we didn’t quite emerge blinking and spluttering, casting looks aghast, countenances set against a chill wind, to greet the new dawn. It’s been more of a slow-motion apocalypse.
The changes wrought by COVID-19 appear to be as much social as they are economic. We have accepted the new powers granted to the police: to enter private property at will, and to order us about – without the need for their actions to have any basis in law.
We have accepted that governments themselves can act outside the law and that the cult of a ‘Presidential’ Prime Minister can allow us to be ruled by decree.
Having already accepted the pseudo-science of ‘climate change’, and pledged allegiance to the United Nations and its unelected agents, we remain firmly impaled upon the sacrificial altar of ‘scientific advice’. It was all carried out in the name of King Corona, whose impact on the global death rate is perhaps no greater than that of seasonal flu. And in New Zealand’s case much less.
I’m sure you will have your own images in mind from the past two months of just how un-free we have become. The haunting image for me, and it remains the most un-Kiwi thing I have ever countenanced, is the policing of the virus on our beaches. There I saw three officers – yes, three – acting on a ‘tip-off’ from a nark, chasing down a lone kayaker and cautioning him sternly.
We understand that everyone must follow the rules, and almost everyone did. But still, it has been deeply disquieting to witness the complete erasure of normal life, and its replacement by a ’new normal’ in which everything is decided for us – by the dictator who appears on lunchtime television.
Ordinary, law-abiding people were prevented from doing all kinds of harmless, ordinary things, like swimming in our rivers and oceans. Many people take to the water or swim habitually and know what they are doing. These people are generally neither risk-takers nor drugged-up pleasure-seekers, and most would never paddle out into the rip between the breakers riding, for example, on an inflatable giraffe.
Now we are into ‘contact tracing’, which is Orwellian Newspeak and Doublethink for in-depth state surveillance. The myriad cameras which fix their gaze upon the law-abiding were, at one time, gazing at anonymous citizens. Now we willingly record our names against our every move and allow ourselves to be followed by tracing software. Once accepted, these intrusions are very difficult to roll back. Big Brother will forever be in our cars and in our businesses, in our homes and in our bedrooms.
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