Bob Jones: Years of shame

Periodically, following an accident, we read of someone falling into a coma then coming out of it a year or so later. Imagine such a Rip Van Winkle situation now with someone who say fell into a coma in mid 2020 and waking today.

When this hypothetical R.V.W lost consciousness the nation was under a Stalinist totalitarian control with daily Great Leader TV broadcasts, infantile nonsense about the team of 5 million, a cringing fat woman ringing her hands on television urging us to be kind, all socialising, working (unless a critical service), public gatherings, sport playing and watching, swimming, restaurant patronising, etc, etc, etc, forbidden; in total an unbelievable Orwellian situation enforced on a compliant public at a level not even attained in war-time.

But the nation weakly obeyed because the great Leader knew best and would save us, just as she allegedly had making White Island behave itself.

So our hypothetical Rip Van Winkle emerging from his 2 years long sleep, reads the newspapers and is bewildered. The great Leader as always is there, only advising she’s looking forward to the holidays and playing with her child in the sea. And a small space alongside mentions that currently circa 40,000 citizens are to various degrees from a down-in-the-dumps day or so, hit with Covid and 13 Covid deaths occured in the last week. It’s a miracle. Grown-ups are seemingly now in charge.

In my view those years marked the most shameful period in our history. That’s not being wise after the event.

On this site in March, 2020 I forecast that when it’s all done and dusted the world will acknowledge the virtue of Sweden’s living with covid approach, with of course appropriate cautions.

That is precisely what eventually occurred, including here in New Zealand. As Britain’s Daily Telegraph editorialised, the world owes Sweden an apology.

But there’s a difference. Most of the world came to its senses after a few months. Here we stretched the disgraceful Stalinist control out for almost 3 years.

When John Key condemned our hermit kingdom a year back he was borrowing from that week’s Economist. In a feature article on dealing with covid The Economist raised the two options, namely live with it and get on with life or go to the other extreme like New Zealand and create a hermit kingdom, which we alone did.

We’re in for a tough few years with hyper-inflation, surging crime (given the unsurprising current passive Government and judicial approach) and coping with the massive debt taken aboard to cover the nation’s close-down for 2 years. Thank God for sport to liven our lives.

Sir Bob Jones is a renowned author, columnist , property investor, and former politician, who blogs at No Punches Pulled HERE.