Get off the Grass

The hundreds of people churning up the Parliamentary lawn are unlikely to read this blog.  If they did, I’d want them to know that they are blinkered and selfish and, in some cases, misled and entitled.  They’d want to punch my lights out for saying so, which possibly makes the point, but I’ll amplify.
The baseline of their cause would seem to be that in the name of their freedom and rights they would blithely stifle the freedoms and rights of others.  Apparently their right to be unvaccinated trumps the rights of others to function in a safe society.  Apparently their right to be free of mandates trumps the rights of others to socialise in a low risk setting.  Apparently the right of a school teacher or nurse or policeman to keep working unvaccinated trumps the rights of the kids in the class, of the sick people in the ward, or of the fellow cops or emergency services he or she has to work with in close quarters (not to mention the injured or terrorised public they’re supposedly helping).

Apparently the entitled on the lawn have never factored in the impact of their demands on the disabled, the diabetic and the chemo-compromised, most of whom are permanently self-locked down for fear of exposure to the virus and possible death.  Apparently the freedom champions have no compunction about exposing and compromising them (the immunocompromised) by their insistent appeal to the so-called Bill of Rights.
Rights can be rescinded for a time, for special reasons, especially where the rights of others are being spurned.  Being vaccine-free and mandate-free are tenuous rights … valid, as long as they don’t infringe the rights of the more vulnerable.  Any decent human being will surrender those rights for the benefit of others.  We’re proud of the Kiwi help-our-neighbour mindset that has us mopping out his flooded basement, but it doesn’t seem to carry over, in the mindset of some, to helping out his neighbour who could get extremely ill if he catches Covid.

The resistors say the science is wrong; the government has ulterior motives; the facts are fake; there is some grand design to dupe us all into tamely accepting tyranny and micro-chips; and someone must speak up.  No, they are the duped themselves.  And given the oxygen granted them, the misinformed, by the sensation-seeking media, we’re left with the sense that the whole world has gone mad!

Let sanity return, you on the lawn, even if it means compromising on your sense of entitlement.  You have to drive on the left hand side of the road, and stop at red lights.  You accept those infringements on your freedom.  So accept the mild loss of freedom currently imposed by a deadly virus (not by a government).  Yes, deadly.  You can’t honestly disbelieve the real numbers.  John Hopkins University is not part of any conspiracy – believe its numbers.  Don’t say there is no virus, no danger.  There clearly is – to many, at least, if not to you.  Accept it for them, the vulnerable and the compromised, and realise that it will only be for a limited time.  It’s not the big deal you’re making it.

Get off the grass and go home and try to bring a positive contribution to the crisis.

Ken F