You can’t breathe. You’re pleading for the vaccine. And it’s just too late.
Diary of the last 36 hours
Sunday morning
Day Whatever of lockdown, and how much more of this can we take?
At least one more day if it’s like this, brother. Look at it.
Hello once again, sunshine!
Hello once again 23 degree days!
Hello once again vivid blue skies!
Hello once more fragrant blossoms in the air, as we take our bikes out into the shining morning and ride towards absolutely don't care, anywhere’s good today and end up at Little Shoal Bay where it's just glorious.
It’s full of happy Aucklanders swimming and paddling with their toddlers; kayaking and hooting; barbecuing their sausages and also their faces because it always takes a first day of this to get back into the swing of the sunblock.
But are we content and happy? You bet your life we are.
Elsewhere in the city of Tāmaki Makaurau people are opening their Sunday paper to have their intelligence not so much insulted as pelted incessantly with rotten produce. Okay, maybe not on every page but if you should trip headfirst into pages 15 and 16 you will for sure get it all over you.
But let's not let it spoil the lovely morning. Let's make a diary note to bring up the absolute state of it later in the week, the platforming of dismal low-wattage mayoral candidates, the cynical opening up of comments sections for clicks and traffic, the whole faithful adherence to the heritage of founding a newspaper to provide moral support to the Waikato Invasion.
But not today. It's just too lovely.
Later in the day comes the news that Counties Manukau DHB has made it to 90% first doses and assuming everyone now in the pipeline goes back for their second in three weeks’ time we’re all good to move forward in Auckland.
This is something to get excited about not only in its own terms but also because of the better place it could take us.
I would not be at all surprised if tomorrow morning we don't hear a leading epidemiologist say, right let's get on up to 95%. Auckland DHB is already there, so we know it's doable, let's emulate that right across the country, and get the kids protected too.
Monday morning
Leading epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson has been on the TV saying right let's get on up to 95%. Auckland DHB is already there, so we know it's doable, I can't see why every DHB in New Zealand can't get up to 95 percent.
He continues:
I can't see why we can't get the majority of 5 to 11-year-olds vaccinated. We are in an amazing position to win over COVID in this pandemic. We are the lucky last and can learn from everybody else. We don't want to take our foot off the accelerator.
I’m in an accentuate the positive mood, because I still have Sunday’s Serotonin pumping through me. Let's see where it takes us.
Seriously, though, hear me out as I make the case that even though it might feel as though we’re on the verge of tearing ourselves apart, things are not about to turn completely to shit.
Right now various mad, bad and dangerous elements are getting plenty of air time. That can tend to distort things a bit, so let’s make due allowance for that.
Secondly, let's consider how those voices may sound once we’ve got all the way to 90% and maybe 95% double dosed and the kids are protected too.
Right now they’re noisy as hell, of course.
You have the business types saying yeah I get that it's a pandemic but I assert as a prestigious person of business that we can take a shortcut and it will work.
You have the people who are feeling disaffected because someone is telling them to feel disaffected, for example the biddable crowd trailing Apostle Brian on his Profits of Doom Summer Tour. They’re dutifully singing along to his political karaoke, but really they’re waiting for him to get back onto the stuff about addiction and putting your broken life back together.
You have the people who will carry their righteous Sword of Truth to some place of visibility, stand it up and use it to monster people. A friend saw a crowd doing this yesterday outside a pop-up vaccination centre at Westlake Boys High. It took her back to her days in Christchurch and the obnoxious intimidating protestors outside the Lyndhurst abortion clinic.
You also have the kind of people who have gone straight to the top shelf for their rhetoric of outrage: the ones wearing labels of Nazi oppression on their jackets and other offensive outpourings of indignation; the ones signing their names to this kind of crap.
And we also have the kind of people who will come at a TV camera person to do violence. That's new, in the sense of the media being designated an enemy of the people, and those lines run straight back to the Populist thugs of Hungary and Brazil and America and a febrile social media. And yes you could infer from that a spectre of gathering menace here in Aotearoa.
But maybe we might just keep calm and count sheeple; and let that soothe us.
That figure of 90% and climbing suggests a very great majority doing what looks like the best thing to do, in a calm and orderly manner, and hoping it doesn’t take too much goddam longer.
Even if it doesn’t feel like it, this looming 90% figure, and you hope 95%, and you hope kids, raises the prospect of a time when our numbers are met and we revert to the way of the rest of the world, and it’s really not so far away now, for better or worse.
Once that happens, there’s going to be much less reason for Prominent Business Persons to be grabbing the mic.
Once that happens, there’s going to be much less reason for Eftpostle Brian to be grabbing it either.
Anyone who feels locked out by mandate will be sure to go on making plenty of noise, but the weight of numbers will be a bit more against them each day. Sometimes there is good reason to lament the tyranny of the majority; but this would not be such a time.
And amongst the smallest minority will be the angry and violent. Should we worry about them getting deadly?
One possibility would be that a small group grows to a dangerous mob.
We’ve had our moments. In the Depression an enraged mob took Queen Street apart for entirely understandable reasons. Another drunken one in the 1980s gave it a shot for no particular reason when Dave Dobbyn couldn't stop them. There were the miners at Waihi and Massey’s Cossacks, there were tour protestors in Molesworth St and Dominion Road; they all had the possibility of igniting. But in our moments of extreme confrontation, we tend to reach a point beyond which we will not go as a mob. Only the evil and deranged press on, into a supermarket, into a mosque, into horror.
But that's not a movement, that is a singular menace, and you stay alert always for that. Or at least you should be; that's what our security services and police are supposed to be for.
As for the rest of it, the gathering mob possibilities, there’s a different rising ominous drumbeat right now and it will likely play the largest role in how the discontented and the angry see things in the next month or three, the same drumbeat that has been running for so long now in and many other places.
You thought it couldn't happen, you thought the whole thing was a hoax. But now you’re in hospital. You can’t breathe. You’re pleading for the vaccine. And it’s just too late.
Maybe I’m too full of Serotonin and things really are on a knife edge.
But I doubt it.
There’s been a lot of looking back to the War as we make our way through this.
It doesn’t always give us what we need but Keep Calm and Carry On is never bad advice.
Also Keep Calm and don’t give in to sensation.
Also Keep Calm and don't read the Herald comments.
Here's what we need to concentrate on, right here.
Vaccinations to 90% by DHB
All Ethnicities
32,601
Māori
89,581
Out of a team of five million, that’s not too many to go. Let’s get it. And then on to 95%. And on to the kids.
Monday afternoon
Here, have some violin Serotonin.
Eftpostle Brian. 🤣 I’m off to hospital as I just split my sides at that.
I really liked this "...I assert as a prestigious person of business that we can take a shortcut .." which is about as entitled a view as you could find.... and I also had a real chuckle at the violins and the "poor me, couldn't help myself and anyway it was your fault" apology at the end... so good