If I can do it, why can’t you?
Have we become a pack of sissies in this world or what? The awful Covid pandemic is romping away overseas, partly, it seems, because people can’t cope with following a few rules to help keep themselves and other people safe.
I got it when Donald Trump didn’t want to wear a mask because I too have a juvenile streak. I had to wear one recently and felt goofy and selfconscious, but you get over that when everyone else is wearing one too.
How difficult and boring is it really? The difficulty lies in finding the spot where you’re not fogging up your glasses all the time, and it can be done because I did it. If I can, so can millions the world over who live in places where people are crowding out hospitals and/or dying.
Your mouth may be your best feature, which you rate highly and on which you slather good lipstick that will go to waste behind a mask, but it’s better than all of you ending up in a coffin, which would be a waste of good lipstick and all your other bits as well.
We can be complacent in this country for now. We seem to be small enough to understand that people we care about and people we know could die if we’re not vigilant, and we also don’t seem to have the issues of trust that have arisen in places like the UK and the US.
Stable government must be part of this problem. Both those countries have become splintered and disillusioned with their leadership and are paying the price for misinformation from the top.
Donald Trump and Boris Johnson seemed to bank on Covid vanishing with magical thinking. Both became infected themselves and recovered pretty quickly, but hundreds of thousands of others didn’t, and now multiplying millions have caught it, just as scientists – who were sidelined – predicted at the outset.
Why didn’t people listen? Because going out on the pull is not only a sacred right but a bounden duty, I guess, even if all you’re doing is getting seriously drunk and failing to pull. A right is a right even when it’s wrong, and a right like this doesn’t work with a mask on.
They didn’t listen because you’re told to wash your hands a lot and use hand sanitiser. Washing your hands frequently is a drag and may mean your nail polish doesn’t last as long as it should. Obviously, it’s your right to have dirty hands and immaculate nails, and no-one has the right to stop you, even if your life depends on it.
Limiting how many people you socialise with at one time is a huge infringement on your rights because you are wildly popular and can only stay that way if your hands are grubby but your fingernails pretty, or you’re uniquely unforgettable. That’s worth dying for right there, especially if you’ve got those little transfers stuck on your nails with the final coat of varnish.
Freedom means never doing what you’re told to do, even if your life depends on it. And they fought the wars for people like us.
I credit the internet in its various guises for some of this. When misinformation is spread as easily as truth, weird ideas can take off and be picked up by, and disseminated by, irresponsible world leaders who care more for power than they do for responsibility.
Maybe, too, people are becoming more comfortable with computers than they are with each other. We risk losing real connection, if that becomes normal, thinking of ourselves as the lone centre of the universe.
If the soaring infection statistics in those countries and others are any indication, that’s already happening.