Wet Weekender: Dry Weekender

Today's the day the Tories and Blairites have their picnic. At the local Tory sponsored watering shithole. If you do down in the pub today... well they're closed. So that's that! My local, so to speak, isn't opening until August, according to the sign the put up. I think that's smart. As for the other two around here, who knows. Maybe they'll open up this evening. To everyone's credit, there weren't hordes of thirsty tradesmen banging on the door gasping for a pint. It's as if it's been a dry county these last months since beer is on sale everywhere else anyway.

I'm sure somewhere, no doubt broadcast on the news, there's some stupid people doing stupid things. Who knows. I can't be expected to keep track of all the stupid in the world. There's only so much my brain can take. Right now it feels like it's bursting at the seams. The world has gotten noticeably smaller and my ambition is getting bigger. That is, something needs to change. I'm feeling more and more restless.

This mirrors just how incompetent this situation has been handled. No can argue otherwise. I'm not suggesting people getting itchy like me should be listened to over the science. I'm saying that had things been handled consistently and, fundamentally, had we a system that coudl cope with this crisis things would be different, at least by now. We've done everything wrong and thousands have paid the price. Hundreds are still dying; 137 yesterday. That's about a thousand a week. The figure is coming down, but it's going to be a while and the process will be fragile, like giving birth to a whole new normal. That baby is fragile, and all it'll take is carelessness to set everything right back to square one.

The lockdown deniers cannot argue that letting things operate normally would have worked, regardless of what you might think of our government (not much). We can see this from the medical disaster that America is turning into. This will be the stuff of Hollywood in years to come, which is a rather cheap way of looking at things, but no doubt accurate. They are counting tens of thousands of new infections while the rabid red right scream blue bloody murder at the prospect of having to wear some cloth over their faces. God knows what they would have made of wartime London, or living in the Blitz. I recall kids having to carry gasmasks and freedoms curtailed, policed by wardens. Yet these precious little snowflakes hue and cry at the prospect of having "their breath taken away", of being "muzzled". God gave them freedom, a word so ubiquitous in the US that it has lost all value and meaning. What is freedom in the context of a pandemic? The freedom to get sick? Fine, knock yourself out. Problem is what about everyone else's freedoms? That's where the logic fails. These people are selfish. Never mind believing that god decreed they be free - free from the virus he created. Nice one.