From Spiked Online…
Brendan O’Neill
Editor of Spiked
This lockdown feels different to the first one. Everyone can sense it. It feels greyer, more dispiriting. The sunny weather of the April / May lockdown has been replaced by rain and the occasional snowstorm, robbing even our ‘daily’ walk of its tiny promise of pleasure. The social solidarity of the first lockdown has been usurped by a concerted emphasis on the necessity of atomisation. Back in March, April, May, we set up local WhatsApp groups and pulled together to shop and care for isolated neighbours. This time round if you go outside you’ll be greeted by ghoulish public-health posters featuring elderly people in oxygen masks and the reprimanding line: ‘Look her in the eyes and tell her you never twist the rules.’ First time round we were assistants to the elderly; this time round we’re their potential killers.
The first lockdown felt novel; this one – the third – feels onerous. The first encouraged us to remove ourselves from society but to still think and behave as members of society: sign up to be an NHS volunteer, deliver medicines to the old, phone a mate and check he’s okay. This one discourages all forms of social connection. This is best summed up by the instruction from the Department of Health’s propaganda wing: ‘Act like you’ve got it.’ That is, assume you are diseased, assume you will sicken others. Who would knock on an elderly neighbour’s door to see if she needs anything if they believed, or assumed, that they were carriers of a virus that has a high fatality rate among the old? In the first lockdown I received messages every hour from local volunteers asking if someone could do some shopping, drop off some drugs, give somebody a phone call. This time, nothing.
Then there’s the most striking difference – the absence of anticipation. In the first lockdown there was always a buzz, building after a while to a palpable sense of national expectancy, about a return to normality. Remember the cheers and memes when we found out the date pubs would reopen? Lockdown was seen as a temporary measure, and more importantly an unusual measure. Aside from a few comfortably off green types who loved the lack of airplanes and the disappearance of greedy shoppers, and some millennial socialists who fantasised that having the government pay everyone’s wages was akin to revolution, most people viewed lockdown as a thing that would end, not a way of life. The baleful impact of lockdown was partially alleviated by a shared desire for a return to the crowded, shoulder-rubbing, maskless days of old. Never had the word ‘normal’ seemed so thrilling. ‘Back to normal’ was the moral glue of a necessarily atomised people. Now, perhaps most tragically of all, that seems to have disappeared, too.
Of course many people still crave a return to normality. But in the public sphere of commentary and politics, talk of opening up, of planning for the thrusting of society back into normalcy, is actively discouraged and even frowned upon. There can be no going back, some say. Ask the government for a timeframe for the restoration of normality and you’ll be branded a ‘Covid denier’ who wants to rush things to a potentially catastrophic degree. ‘We are not at the beginning of the end of this pandemic’, says Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis, ‘we’re just at the end of the beginning’.
The ‘dream of going back to normal’ is a ‘huge distraction’, says a writer for the Guardian. The inescapable Devi Sridhar, the public-health academic whose voice of doom is enthusiastically coveted by the media, speaks to us as if we are patients on a therapist’s couch – ‘it is perfectly normal to grieve for our lost normality, but denial needs to be followed by acceptance’, she has counselled. This idea of ‘denial’ – the favoured slur of lockdown elites who want to frustrate discussion about life and liberty after Covid – was taken up by the New Statesman, too. The blather about going ‘back to normal’ is just a way of ‘denying reality’, says one of its columnists. Which isn’t surprising – ‘denial… is a natural dysfunction’. ‘It is a hard truth to swallow, but: there won’t be a return to “normal”’, says a writer for the Atlantic. Click here to read entire article at source…
Comment:
There’s only one way to object to the “lockdown is here to stay” mentality and that is not to comply. There IS no other way. If you disagree, share your strategy, because I’m fresh out of ideas…
It seems to me that if everyone opened up businesses – and churches – and we all went about our daily lives as we did before China sent us this less-than-deadly virus, there really isn’t anything the Governments of the UK could do, except bring in the military to round us up and take us to the re-education camps… and thus they would be revealing their true colours, making clear their real agenda. Then we would know that this is not about a virus at all. Not at all. And is this not what we have been saying from the get-go?
At that point, we could surrender our freedom freely (so to speak) – we would know officially that the game was up. Until then, we need to stop the childish obedience and start living our lives fully again. Yes? No?
