Another day, another crazy suicidal attempt to ascertain personal freedom.
Australians pride ourselves with our layback and free attitude, but over the weekend, we saw the ugliest display of freedom in the form of killing the exact thing we valued and fought for from inside out.
Nobody wants a lockdown. Nobody wants stay-at-home orders. Nobody wants mandatory face mask wearing. Nobody likes to be jabbed. But we are in the middle of a pandemic that has no end in sight. And people are dying in our hospitals with a real threat of overloading our public health system, which has long been underfunded and plagued by fractional politics within and outside of the system.
So, is it too much to ask everyone, as a member of our proud society to stay home, endure the restrictions for a bit, so our society can get back on its feet?
Apparently not.
No matter how different fractions, sectors, or group of people want to brand these people, who gathered in the city, without face masks, and some potentially COVID positive, this is a very worrying side of our society – we are killing ourselves gradually, and a lot of people will become collateral damages along the way.
The populist and divisional movement in our country’s politics has been undermining our society bit by bit for years. The process was accelerated when opposition leaders were about opposing everything the other side of the politics proposed, and the governing party was about pleasing individual groups to add up to their core voters to push them across the line to stay in power. Staying in power has become their sole and only purpose. And to do that, big donors and popularist small sectors became the targets. When you stop governing for everyone, you are killing the society.
I have talked about how corrosive Scott Morrison’s government has been in the past 18 months by politicising the pandemic instead of seeing this as a chance to step up to show Australians that he is the actual Australian Prime Minister. His continued approach of throwing medical experts and other groups of people under the bus with his vaccine rollout, his failure to curb misinformation being spread by members of his Parliament from all walks of life, and his failure to genuinely acknowledging his failures have all led us into this COVID limbo. But that said, is our society partly responsible for allowing this to happen to us too? Are we committing suicide to the society that we collectively belonging to?
Over the weekend, people who think that their own freedom has priorities over other people’s and the society’s health demonstrated the fact that, they have cast the society, which they should be part of, aside and stand for a division of community. The exact approach the Scott Morrison government has been actively cultivating through his ministers and the orchestrated propaganda with the Murdoch empire. I am not saying that these people do not exist before the Scott Morrison government took hold. But before Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott, these people were under check and balance, because they well knew that their thinking and what they stood for were anti-social. But the normalisation of this behaviour by the Liberal National government had created an outflow of sewage that our society’s draining system cannot handle, and thus bursting out everywhere.
A lot of people were angry, outraged and upset. But these people, who went out knowingly or unknowingly infecting other people with the latest Delta variant, felt they were being heard. Felt they are now the force in the society. Felt that they can revert back to whatever supremacy that they felt their groups should be granted in the first place. We haven’t heard the Prime Minister or any Federal Minister came out to condemn these people yet. That silence speaks volume of what our Federal Government stands for. The repeated coverage from different media outlets without a doubt will further give these groups of people a sense that they have been heard. And I am quite confident that the Murdoch media will capitalise this to further build up anti-government forces whenever they needed to deploy them.
For me the saddest part was the rest of our society will be paying the price for the self-demolition of our long-prided layback and free society. When your freedom means the death of other people, you are ridding other people the very basic freedom to live. When you rid other people of this basic freedom, in the strictest sense, you should not be rewarded with your own freedom. However, in our current society, personal freedom became so obsessively important that other people do not matter anymore. If we continue to allow this trend to grow, how long would it be before our society collapse like a sinkhole of incalculable magnitude?
We are one, but we are all also. Unless, communities of all sides come together, it will just be a matter of time that our society become a suicide-city. If that happens, we all lost. It is not about one sector of the society winning, but the society as a whole we all won. Unless there is a shift in mentality, it will still be a long way before we can get out of this rabbit hole.
Update: the Prime Minister just came out to condemn the actions.
