As that wonderful West Country lilt boomed out of Alexa and Heart Gloucestershire’s News bulletin this morning, I began to realise that I was listening to the real damage that Boris has done to this Country, made real through the words and deeds of a Gloucester Shopkeeper.
“Nobody’s exempt from spreading a virus” said it all. As the local radio journalist reported that this shop owner was turning away anyone not wearing a face mask, including those who the Government had declared exempt.
The realty that there are now retailers willing to break rights laws to keep the virus that they have actively been encouraged to fear so passionately out of their store, tells us that the whole set of myths created by the Government for nothing more than political expediency are now well and truly out of control.
The problem is now unlikely to be tamed by anyone or anything whilst even the slightest remnants of social distancing and any form of the Lockdown remain.
Fear can do this to people because of the way that fear works. It permeates everything at some level within the human experience, basically motivating us all.
Just any old person rocking up and telling you that your life is at risk from something you haven’t heard of will most often be met with the scorn that such statements require when life experience or simple common sense will tell us what the risk of anything really is. But when so many people’s experience has been that the Government and the mainstream media are to be trusted above all else and they then tell us partial truths -intentionally knowing what the result will be, this manifestation of involuntary and unconscious stupidity is bound to be the end result.
Many, in fact probably most people currently inhabit an ideological no man’s land in between those who are against mask wearing, social distancing and everything about the Lockdown, and then what appears to be a group of zealots who clearly believe in the truth of what the Government is doing even more so than the Government does itself.
People who bolt on their own interpretation of these crazy rules to those pushed upon us by the Government are not only likely to believe they are doing the right thing. They interpret that they will benefit from the publicity that the story generates, as the establishment narrative suggests to them that others will come out in support of what they have done.
The big problem for us – other than the stupidity of the Government and the establishment itself, is that we are culturally in a black hole with a fear-based gravitational pull. Political correctness, wokeness and the ability of online activists to ‘cancel’ people just because they have decided that someone else could be offended by their words or actions have reached critical levels.
We are at genuine risk of this ridiculous Government adopting even more restrictive social distancing measures to appease these people, even though the Government knows that the whole thing was created for no purpose that was of public benefit.
Every additional restriction is a degenerative step against the cohesiveness of our society and the Government is on a very slippery slope to making this situation uncontrollably worse for us all.
The abuse of public trust and disingenuousness of the engineered manipulation that has been used by people who were given their power to benefit us – not control us, would be criminal if it had been carried out by anyone or any organised body other than the Government. This reality doesn’t excuse it. It makes what they are doing and what they have done even worse.
Activists such as those following #KBF don’t understand why people keep putting on masks to go into shops and are doing what they are told. But just like people pay their taxes every month, most law-abiding people don’t see there being any voluntary choice, or they would exercise it. That is why what Boris and his cronies have done is in effect systemic abuse of the masses – arguably only for their own gain.
Without a change in direction on the part of this Government or a change in the Government itself – which is likely to come anyway very soon, people are going to be increasingly divided between those who believe all of the Government myths and will then choose how to interpret them, and those who refuse to be ‘on board’ with any of what the Government and anyone supporting the measures they have imposed chooses to do.
This is now becoming a question of whether to live in constant fear of living to protect lives that no longer have value because of a myth, or better to just get on and live one.
Let’s just say the question would be on very questionable ground if the threat was real – which it clearly is not.
The only way for this madness to be stopped is for all of the Government measures for responding to the Coronavirus to be dropped and for Boris and Co to return to what they should have been doing in the first place. That would be to focus the considerable public resources that we have put at their disposal to manage any genuine cases of the Coronavirus Illness if and where they exists, as they would any one of the significant number of illnesses, diseases and conditions that kill many British people every day that we never hear about unless our own lives have been directly touched by loss.
To preserve our culture and retain at least a realistic level of humanity within our relationships with people outside of our own homes, we must get this ridiculous mask rule and all of the social distancing and lockdown measures reversed as soon as we possibly can. But we need to get rid of this Government, this political class and the establishment too.
Whilst it is easy to believe otherwise, the two are not mutually exclusive. The problems we have will just get worse and get more ridiculous in other forms for as long as these stupid politicians retain power to do more wrong.
Adam Tugwell 