Stop the Spread! of lockdown whinging
Sacrifices must be made
I always see pretty much the same thing said about Australia’s covid lockdowns — that this was a horrible, traumatising period that left deep, painful scars. Even in ostensibly left-spaces, those who disagree usually keep quiet, I suspect because the alternative is being dogpiled and branded a woke scold who wants to keep everyone home for no reason.
And so much of this complaining comes from people who had it perfectly fine. NewsCorp columnists who live in nice apartments with plenty of disposable income and free time would have you believe they were crawling through mud and filth with a rifle pressed against their back. Suburban families living in expansive homes with their own swimming pool will look you in the eyes and tell you, entirely sincerely, that lockdowns destroyed their mental health and the government needs to be held accountable for it.
I know these people could’ve had a perfectly fine experience in lockdown because for a lot of people that’s exactly what happened. It was totally fine. Because let’s be clear, even at the most extreme — Melbourne’s Stage Four Lockdown — you were still allowed to leave the house. One hour of exercise outside a day is harsh, yes, as is a curfew and being stuck in the same 5km. But you know, often, life is just what you make it.
(We mustn’t forget that these are the strictest the laws ever got in the entire country, and are not indicative of the average Australian experience. This is so important to remember when you see the well-off prattling on about it.)
Being forced to spend time with your kids isn’t the worst thing in the world. Having to read in the backyard isn’t the worst thing in the world. Going for a run every day isn’t the worst thing in the world.
And, obviously, there are people for who lockdown was actually a nightmare and sucked, not because they didn’t develop the right coping strategies, but because they never could. I’m talking here about the residents of nine public housing blocks who were subjected to the kind of lockdown we like to pretend we all were — banned from leaving the house at all, with no end in sight, and given a measly stipend from the government to make up for it. Those people have a right to complain!
I’m also talking about school children from underresourced schools across the country. Online learning is obviously not as good as face-to-face, we know that, but it can be done. Provided, of course, that the school can actually provide laptops to its students, which many couldn’t.
But the thing is, these schools were underresourced well before covid, and they continue to be now. Unless the people who want us to think of the poor children forced into online learning are passionate advocates for properly funding our schools — which, let’s be honest, they almost never are, since they’re dyed-in-the-wool conservatives — we should realise they are using those students as props for their real grievance: the closing of bars and restaurants.
And there are others who got trapped in terrible homes with terrible families. The perspective of all these people, and others, has an important place in the historical record, but we shouldn’t let ourselves think it’s the only experience.
We also shouldn’t memory hole what the early days of the pandemic were like. Humans are not well-suited to hypotheticals, especially looking back. We remember our experience, and if it was bad, it’s easy then to think we were locked up for no reason.
You just have to put up with these things sometimes
I supported the lockdowns and continue to think they were good. Many should have continued longer. I wouldn’t put society into a perma-lockdown forever, just for fun, but we weren’t doing it just for fun.
The alternative to lockdowns wasn’t business as usual. We can look around the world to places like the United States, where lockdowns were implemented spottily, too-lightly, or not at all, if we want to see what the alternative was.
It was mass graves in New York City. It was a 9/11 worth of people dying every day. Hospitals overloaded, ICUs completely full, and those without covid dying as they waited for an overworked doctor to see them. In the United States, losing a loved one to covid became routine — when we kept Melbourne and the rest of Australia locked down, we managed to keep it the tragedy it should be.
So while the experiences of those who had it genuinely tough — and didn’t just hate having to spend time with their kids — should be remembered, it should never be to the exclusion of that alternative, which we watched happen around the world. I fear it will be, because every institution and person with power in this country pushed for a rapid opening up, and is now interested in rewriting the historical record to paint lockdowns as staggering government overreach, cynically using those who did suffer as cover for their own hardline conservative agenda.
Lockdowns meant sacrifice. That much is true. Some sacrificed a hell of a lot more than others, but we were all asked to. And if we can’t make these kinds of sacrifices — whether it be as simple as not going clubbing or as extreme as being properly locked in for days — for the sake of lives, then what can we make them for?
This is my ultimate problem with the way we talk about lockdowns now. Every scrap of suffering they caused was for a specific, unequivocally good goal — keeping people alive. There are almost certainly people you know who, if we had followed the example of Florida, would not be here right now. The last time you saw them wouldn’t have been Grand Final lunch — it would’ve been their funeral. There are many more who would be permanently disabled, some in small ways, some in much larger ones.
The cynical reframing of lockdowns has even spread to allegedly left and progressive circles. It is exceedingly, depressingly common to see an immunocompromised person lament the lack of mask mandates — masks not even required in most hospitals anymore(!) — only to be attacked by “lefties” branding them a woke scold who wants nobody to leave the house.
This lack of empathy is astounding. In fact, the reason immunocompromised people want mask mandates is so they can leave the house! Just because you are vaccinated, have a measure of previous infection immunity, and like your odds, doesn’t mean you are the only person on earth. Not everybody is like you, and the fact is there are still many for who a covid infection is a life-or-death battle.
Almost all of them, like me, acknowledge that the battle is lost. We had a chance to contain covid, but soon every industry was pushing to have as many workers on site as possible with as few protections as possible — air filters are expensive, lives are cheap. The moment vaccines were widely available we pivoted to opening up as quickly as possible, and those who should know better went along with it.
This also meant the government abandoned any responsibility for long-term mitigation, promising that vaccines would be enough. We would be asked to sacrifice a lot less if they, for example, mandated air filters and installed them in all public buildings — or attempted any mitigations at all, really. But “living with covid” hasn’t meant hospital mask mandates, air filters, and continued support for work-from-home. It has meant dying with covid.
The consequence of choosing to live with covid for ever, in a just society, would mean mask mandates also basically for ever, in high-risk settings at minimum.1 Especially high-risk settings immunocompromised people have no choice but to visit, like hospitals and GP offices. But instead we have decided some people have to risk death because masks can be uncomfortable.
You have to worry about where we’re going, in light of all this. We can’t give up the gym to keep people alive. We can’t tolerate wearing masks in the hospital to keep people alive. In Florida, they didn’t want to give up anything, turning every gathering of a certain size into a guaranteed superspreader event.
How we currently think of lockdowns is a massive win for the right. To them, there is no society to protect. We don’t owe anything to anybody, especially not those stupid IDIOTS who want to stay home all day — so cruel are they, they want ME to be locked up too!
At the end of the day, it’s just you. You are a little treat boy, a shark swimming alone, and anything in your way better get the hell out of it or be torn to pieces. Ripped apart, screaming, flesh torn from the bone. It’s what you deserve for trying to take my favourite restaurant from me, my afterwork drinks, my precious CBD office space.
No amount of individual choices can stop a pandemic. It’s a drop in the bucket now. You can go out in a mask, but you’re surrounded by people who don’t, and what does it matter if you or the guy next to you infect and kill a disabled person? They still die, and that hopelessness spreads — if nobody else wants to acknowledge their obligations to others, you’re not noble for acting otherwise — you’re just another sucker.
Remember they were necesarry
I think it is important to push back. I think we should say lockdowns were good and, if it were necessary, we should be willing to do them again. We expect that covid was a once-in-every-hundred-years pandemic, but climate change is accelerating and we may be faced with another, deadlier virus twenty, thirty years from now.
Even if we aren’t, and everything turns out fine, we should be willing to say that sacrificing for other people isn’t just a good thing, but a baseline requirement for your humanity. We are inherently social animals, and if you accept the neoliberal insistence that we aren’t, then what are you? A cruel, vicious beast beholden to the laws of the jungle?
And it’s also important to remember, especially years from now, that not everybody suffered, and many who did only did so because they were totally unwilling to try anything at all to feel better, instead insisting on marinating in rage and hate as they went further and further into right-wing rabbit holes that told them to rail against lockdowns instead of cope with them. Because why should you have to stay home if you’re fine with the risk?
But I worry it’s all too frayed, and that soon “we owe something to each other” will be the most radical statement you can make — and that, when the next pandemic comes, Australia will see its own mass graves.
And the way to avoid this was to go all in on eradicating it!