The New COVID Normal: A Prison for the Insane
You are beside me. I am beside you. Wait for me. As Nick Cave put it. If all these prophets of the day and of yore were right, now really was the hour. Old Alex was as bewildered by it as those who watched. He could see, like low strung clouds hanging in the valley, as if catching something just out of reach, a river as if of time, a journey beyond; and if the ancients were manipulating this timeline, it was a technology well beyond anything man currently possessed, and if it was just a figurative or imaginative way of expressing something else that was play; well so be it.
The Australian derangement was complete.
The authorities had not just taken the country to the edge of the abyss, but had plunged straight over.
Everything had come unstuck.
The population was curdling in their own dreams, trapped inside their own houses, increasingly frustrated, increasingly desperate. There was no end to it.
In Oak Flats, as humble, as ordinary a place as you were likely to get, Old Alex met no one who was happy, and no one who supported the government's actions; which essentially had been to imprison their own population in an hysteria chamber for the past 18 months.
The shopping mall, a 12 minute drive from his house, was almost entirely deserted, with only a few operations continuing to function.
Masked up, having accepted the mask mandates, the population grew more distant from each other.
The temple dogs who had once barked their warnings now flooded the ether with images of throat slitting in stone temples; all a warning. The other banks of images, be they animal spirits or futuristic machines, remained as they were: clearly they were in the right place at the right time, although how that could be, considering the collapse of the country, he did not know.
Increasingly, that was the talk. That this political class, this political system, had abjectly failed us all, and needed to be swept aside.
We needed to start again.
Forty teenagers a day were now being admitted to hospital each day in NSW alone for self-harm and suicide attempts.
Individuals and nations can yearn for the abyss, but how could it be that despite all the international ridicule, all the suffering, all the over the top authoritarianism and the thousands of personal tragedies now occurring as a direct result of inappropriate government action, that nobody had called a stop to it all.
He didn't know the answer. Increasingly no one knew the answer to a simple question:
How could it be?
How could this have happened.
Dispirited, disempowered; and you watch, violence on the streets.
NEWS
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