It is utterly true what they say about horse racing: the only certainties are bills and disappointment. It is equally true to say of human existence that there will always be more misery.
Sometimes that misery will come in the relatively puny form of a Trump or a Himmler. Sometimes it will rise up and sweep us away in the millions. Yes, I am indeed thinking of pandemics. You’ve got your 1918 influenza kind, you’ve got your Black Death kind, you’ve got your 24 hours-left-if-you’re-lucky kind. The one thing you’ve got for certain is the knowledge that it will come again. If gripping your rosary beads hard helps, then go right ahead, but let’s also reflect on how well we did in the last one.
I’ve been feeling more and more lately that it might actually have helped certain people understand things better if we hadn’t actually got a vaccine.
How might people who so confidently declare that Jacinda/Labour/Those Clowns/Those Deep State Operatives overreacted and left us with crippling debt and economic ruin be talking today had there been no vaccine?
What if a swathe had been steadily cutting its way through the population for years?
How might they be seeing things if we’d had to endure a grimmer and much longer wait for mutations to bring it eventually to heel?
How readily do they imagine the people who they maintain were so keen to get back to normal — but thwarted by a fussy, overcautious government—would have been to put their heads out the door?
Would they care to hazard a guess about the economic damage you might have got from having an economy limp along while an uncontrolled virus ravaged it?
This goes equally for two types.
You’ve got your National Party types, who take the haughty view that they would never have overspent and borrowed so much, would have known exactly when to open things up again, and would have got us the vaccine sooner.
Then there are the rabbit hole types incensed about the idea of being made to accept a life-protecting vaccine. I just wonder how they’d be talking if we’d been unprotected and in due course they had seen death roll up to their door and choke the breath slowly out of a loved one, or two, or six.
I am getting so sick of having to sit through the same diatribe over and over from these types because it’s plain to see that their minds are utterly walled up with certitude.
Okay then, be like that, but why do you imagine I have any interest in having you recite it over and over?
Do you imagine I will eventually clap my hand to my forehead and say, gosh, I had never thought of these things you have asserted to me repeatedly, which offer no insight and ignore various aspects of reality .
Or are you so walled up you’ve forgotten you’ve already put it to me six times?
Life is all about adaptation. It’s the lesson of the pandemic; it’s proving to be the lesson of the pandemic denial. So I’m thinking of making a few laminated cards. I’ll just pull them out and plonk them down as each tired trope gets rolled out again.
Card one: It’s only your assertion, not a settled fact, that Labour left us in a financial mess.
Card two: The level of debt they took on (in order to keep us safe and steady in the face of deep uncertainty and about which so many people have developed amnesia) was, by international standards, not so much. Most OECD economies are far more indebted than ours.
Card three: If you’re really worried about paying our way out of this debt, put your support into policies that explore sustainable ways for us to make money. If we borrowed the same again and invested it in a 21st century future, we’d soon be paying it down.
Card four: If you’re really so worried about the nation’s debt, check out how much private goddamned debt the country carries thanks to its myopic preoccupation with property speculation.
Card five: In 20/20 hindsight, yes, maybe they could have taken Auckland out of lockdown sooner. But if you look at the inquiry report, it’s not saying lockdown should not have happened.
Card six: The crucial thing, if we’re open of mind and possessed of good faith, is that we would embrace the understanding we’ve acquired and apply it to the next pandemic. But good luck with that.
Anyway. Enough of that. How did you go at the races last Saturday?
