It's been the state's role to provide people with the resources to protect themselves, an entirely different sentiment. It's only in the last few years that this idea the state is meant to nanny us has become accepted, dangerously accepted. You can seek healthcare, and it will be there for you. You can seek benefits and use them to keep yourself from abject destitution, but the onus is on you to re-enter the working world if you want a higher standard of living. We have a first rate education system, but a parent or young adult can choose whether their children/they wish to engage with it and further their education. We have a fabulous police and criminal justice system - but you choose whether to involve yourself with it when a crime is committed.
What were seeing now, is a different kettle of fish. The agency of choice has been completely removed. You either sign up to have your life and livelihood destroyed, or you're a selfish criminal with no regard for others. The nuance, the individuality and individual liberty has been eroded.
Tell the hundreds of thousands across the country piling onto universal credit and queuing for food vouchers when the number of Covid deaths yesterday was 63 people, that a nationwide lockdown is still the right solution to these problems. Tell the hundreds of thousands more including myself who've went from full time employment to unstable part time work, that the lockdowns are price worth paying. Tell the millions of parents and grandparents who've been unable to see the grandchildren this was a price worth paying. Tell those locked in care homes in their dying days with no access to family this was a price worth paying. Tell the thousands of businesses lying in mountainous levels of debt, that this lockdown was a price worth paying. Tell the tens of thousands of families left without the opportunity to say a proper goodbye to their nearest and dearest, that this lockdown was a price worth paying. Tell the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions who have worked for decades to save up for a comfortable retirement, or to see them through a bad patch now left eeking down their life savings to keep themselves alive without an iota of access to the welfare system, that this lockdown has been a price worth paying. Don't expect them to listen to you or care for what you say.
There is nothing wrong with Coronavirus guidance and giving governmental advice, there is everything wrong with forcing that advice on an entire population and making the seeking of basic human desires like social interaction and free trade of business, and engagement in basic human rights like protest a criminal activity. There has been previous pandemics, none were treated with the same liberty restrictive severity as this for good reason; it wouldn't have been accepted by a population that hadn't been indoctrinated to think that the state was their to be it's parent, not it's facilitator.
There has been many other social tragedies, often with large death counts throughout the history of our country. In every instance the public has been given advice on what it should do and provided with the opportunity to make their own decisions, with some exceptions. None before, and hopefully none again have been used to exert so much control, to lay entire segments of our working population to ruin and to ruin entire industries.
It's not about simply 'opening the economy up earlier' - it's about restoring life and liberty, it's about preventing long term deprivation factors. Unemployment at the age of 18-24 is linked to long term career and lifelong financial poverty - we've just created millions of lifetime poor in order to save the lives of the primarily elderly and vulnerable, millions of people who will likely need increased healthcare as they age as a result of poverty linked health issues, millions of people left to rot to save a few hundred thousand lives. I'm not saying we should have never locked down at all, but the question of cost v benefit is not as clear-cut as it was at the start of the pandemic.
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