Writes our Editor: Darren Birks
I can't remember what I did during the great SARS lockdown, or Bird Flu for that matter. Oh, that’s right, because we didn’t have one.
What the Coronavirus Crisis has done, if nothing else, is highlight just how less resilient as a society we’ve now all become than we once were. We thought it was just the Millennial Snowflake generation that were afraid of their own shadows, and expected society to mollycoddle them throughout every aspect of their lives, but now we see that their parents too are incapable of being responsible adults.
We’ve created a society dominated by weak-minded simpletons where ‘the science’ is “hide under your bed until the danger has gone”. This unbelievably ridiculous idea, that percolated throughout Europe, based on the say-so of one discredited scientist, highlights the lack of common sense, let alone a common backbone, throughout our society in the 21st Century.
That said, it’s a good method to reduce any danger: road deaths; terrorism; obesity; you name it, we can ‘flatten the curve’ of all of these things by hiding under our beds. Just hide under your bed and watch the experts proved right. Or rather, get some technocrat to tell you to hide under your bed, absolving you from all personal responsibilities.
It’s how we beat the Nazis. No, wait, it fucking isn’t is it? Repeatedly in the media commentators are likening this to the suffering people endured during the two world wars though it bears no similarity whatsoever. If you think sitting on your arse watching Netflix and ordering Deliveroo is anything like having Nazi planes over your house, then you need to have a serious word with yourself.
Thursday evening's clapathon for the NHS is that wonderful mix of Groupthink and Virtue-signalling that, rest assured, like Mother Teresa praying for the dying, has no effect on the outcome of a single patient. Not one. (Thousands died in her care, when there was a perfectly good hospital down the road by the way).
The left were quick to jump on the lockdown because it appealed to their authoritarian instincts and the ultimate idea of a nanny state. They didn't question the science, even though it was a computer model produced by the same scientific charlatan whose previous predictions for every virus from the last 20 years had been less accurate than random-chance, because it was the outcome they so desperately desired. When the government had to then pay people to stay at home those same idiots claimed it was 'vindication' of their socialist ideas. Now, whilst they sit in their comfortable middle class homes doing their work from laptops in front of white bookshelves (why are they always white?) they again take the authoritarian view that the working class can't go back to work because it's 'not safe'. More hiding under your beds plebs. Never mind that they're perfectly ok, they're thinking of you. You see, unlike Owen Jones and the rest of the Guardianistas, you are not capable of assessing the risk-factors in your own life, you must stay at home, under your bed, until such times as there are no dangers in the big scary world outside.
We've fallen victim to mass-hysteria, and even though we are now technically not even in a Pandemic we have been frightened so much by the exaggerated stories, misleading graphs and anecdotes from the worst affected, we do not want to venture outside our front doors.
Meanwhile, the economy (remember that thing?) is in freefall, costing the country some 2.4 BILLION a DAY and is estimated to put 2 million on the dole and cause 150,000 extra deaths over the next 5 years. Maybe if we all hide under our beds that will go away too.