Beware the ides of March.
Julias Caesar ignored such superstitious claptrap, yet the advice, if heeded, might have changed world history; who knows? The ides – ‘the middle”, from which we get ‘divide’ – has come and gone. At the ‘kalender’, the beginning of the month, our leader assured us the chances of catching Covid19 from asymptomatic carriers was “very, very low”, yet here we are at ‘finis’, the end of the month, under house arrest.
Breast-beating “Basil Bush” Mike Bush is threatening us about our movements, and the government, along with its sycophantic press-narks, is encouraging us to snitch on our community fellows for being too far from home lest we or thee transmit the horrible virus like some sort of death stare or exercise in bone-pointing. Wow.
One thing hasn’t changed: the Ministry of Health is still letting us down. Let’s face it; they’ve been bloody useless at a time we needed them to be on top of their game. When this thing erupted, they snoozed. This virus was always going to be a big problem for New Zealand. What was required was a bit of common sense, which evaded them.
Faced with a huge problem for travellers; given the earth is covered in nasty stuff that can easily damage a bi-ped, earliest humankind pondered, best recorded in words by Shantideva, 1300 years ago:
“Where would I find enough leather to cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet, it’s as if the whole world has been covered.”
Our most distant ancestors understood that the huge problems could be solved in the simplest ways, yet our Health Ministry didn’t.
Should we quarantine each arrival, tourist or citizen regardless, to these shores, or should we quarantine every single person and household within same shores, grinding the country to a virtual halt? So simple, the right answer, yet they couldn’t work it out.
One thing hasn’t changed; the Ministry was telling us at kalender the chance of a widespread outbreak here was low, and here, at finis, they’re still saying the same thing, in Ministry doublespeak:
So what are we doing here? Let’s go out and celebrate! Oh…
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