We can’t go for a drink.
We can’t go for a meal.
We can’t go to the theatre.
We can’t go to the cinema.
We can’t go to a concert.
We can’t go for a walk.
We can’t go for a run.
We can’t visit our children.
We can’t talk to our neighbours.
We can’t have a picnic.
We can’t sit in our own garden.
We can’t get proper news.
We can’t go recreational shopping.
We can’t meet friends, even accidentally.
We can’t get our hair cut.
We can’t get our eyes checked.
We can’t have our hearing checked.
We can’t have our teeth checked.
We can’t admire the natural beauty of Germinal because of the overhanging omnipresent gloom.
We can’t buy rat poison without clicking and collecting.
We can’t properly bury the dead.
We can’t properly mourn the dead.
We can’t even go to church.
This is a level of austerity and hair-shirtedness that Oliver Cromwell could not even have dreamt of.
What on earth are we becoming?
We are destroying the world’s economies and societies in pursuit of a faith-based outcome.
Why are we so passively accepting these totalitarian restrictions of our hard won freedom? We are condescendingly told that we are ‘allowed’ one hour out of the house each day.
We are living in a virtual HM Prison. I would not be surprised if someone suggests that the only way to ensure we don’t go out for more than the allotted hour a day is that we are forced to hand over our keys to people, let’s call them warders, who will come along at an appropriate time set by them, to let us out.
The prisoners of war in Stalag Luft III in 1944 had more freedom of movement and association than we currently have.
Do you think they would bother tunnelling to ‘freedom’ if that is what ‘freedom’ consists of? More likely, we’d be tunnelling IN.
I read yesterday that 103,000 people have died around the world with coronavirus over the past four or five months (note that that is with, not of).
I calculate that that is equivalent to around 0.0015% of the world’s population, meaning that 99.9985% haven't died.
When did the people ‘governing’ us lose all sense of perspective?
I also heard it suggested on the radio yesterday that the UK, with 10,000 deaths, is the country with the most coronavirus-linked deaths in Europe.
Seconds later, on the same programme on the same radio channel, it was reported that Spain had recorded 17,000.
Even Mrs B, a self-confessed discalculate, knows that 17,000 is a higher number than 10,000. If reporters and presenters cannot get basic key facts right, why do we even pay any attention to them?
Why are we putting up with this?
Dying, even dying prematurely, is an essential element of the human condition. By shutting ourselves up in this way, paralysed in fear of a mutated common cold virus, we are in effect denying a key part of our humanity.
Cue torrents of abuse. Badly spelt and grammatically seriously flawed abuse for the most part, I predict.
I personally see this as yet another plank in the argument for teaching moral philosophy and applied economics from primary school onwards, to help 'ordinary' people acquire the techniques and awareness that enable constructive argument and debate to proceed.
I remember being asked in a moral philosophy tutorial, in the Adam Smith Building at the University of Glasgow, to discuss the philosophical distinction between killing someone and letting someone die.
And to put a value on a human life, which at the age of 17 thought it impossible to do. Then I started meeting students of accounting.
I never thought I might find myself in a society where the distinction between letting die and killing might happen in a real life situation, but the question is in effect presenting itself globally today.
Is it worth the price we are paying to save lives, many of which which will end in the short term in any event, and all of which will end at some time in any event, as long-running trials since the moment of the arrival of the species on the planet gently suggest that 100% of human beings die?
