Andrew Gardiner feels like a character from the movie Die Hard as he gets his first taste of harsh lockdown. Image: Twentieth Century Fox.
“Stop yelling at the TV! Buddy Franklin can’t hear you!” my mother admonished.
And just like that, this Sydney-supporting, Adelaide-based adult was transported back to his Melbourne adolescence, trapped in the childhood home he was visiting by a snap Victorian lockdown and shackled by his mother’s house rules. Oh, the joys of rediscovering those surly bonds of youth.
I was unlucky or unwise enough to cross the SA-Victorian border to celebrate my mother’s birthday in early August, just as the current lockdown kicked in. I now find myself living out of the spare bedroom of her smallish abode in Melbourne’s south, under lockdown and curfew orders (stifling by Adelaide’s laidback standards) plus matriarchal rules that I, frankly, hadn’t missed.
“Don’t slam the door!”; “I didn’t!”; “Yes you did!” has been the gist of many a recent colloquy. You can just imagine how it went down when my dog – who travelled across the border with me – peed on the floor to mark her new ‘territory’.
Three coats of Pine O Clean and white vinegar later, mum swears she can still smell it. Clearly the house is my mother’s territory, not my dog’s and certainly not mine.
“Well, never mind, I’m sure SA will disregard their newly-instituted hard border, consider my conundrum, factor in my fully-vaccinated status and allow me to return on compassionate grounds,” I told myself. Yeah, good luck with that:
So here I am, in the third week of an unanticipated incarceration that’s way past wearing thin. I’m joined, of course, by millions of Melbournians enduring “Delta Variant Deja Vu” after all they went through last year, and Sydneysiders (whose state holds the new daily record for COVID-19 cases) where soldiers go door-to-door enforcing stay-at-home orders in the city’s worst-affected areas.
Coming as I do from a state relatively untouched by COVID-19, some Melbourne or Sydney readers may feel an odd sensation of schadenfreude at my predicament. Perhaps they recall a famous quote from a certain action movie from the late ‘80s:
Scene from Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis (above). Image: Twentieth Century Fox.
I feel your pain, eastern staters, and I’m not meaning to minimise your struggles, but most of you aren’t living in a real-life rerun of the classic ABC series ‘Mother and Son’.
Don’t get me wrong: my mum has all her mental faculties and has been more-than-fair for the most part. That said, ‘living with mum’ was a matter of choice, not obligation, for Garry McDonald’s character, Arthur Beare, and most people coping with lockdown are where they’ve chosen to live, surrounded by the people they want to live with.
With all due respect to mum, I’d take that in a heartbeat.
We all have coping strategies to emotionally escape this lockdown labyrinth. Writing this article is a form of therapy for me, as is the black humour decried by, yes, my mother (let’s keep said humour, which I’m about to share, between us, shall we?).
“The things that are bad in our life can also be good fodder for comedy,” psychology professor Peter McGraw said. “The act of making jokes is about transforming (the negative) into something that is laugh-worthy and allows us the opportunity to see situations differently.”
Forgive me, but my particular brand of black humour these days comes from mocking low-level COVID sceptics. Their stupidity is deadly serious for both themselves and those they endanger (that’s us, by the way) but I’d rather laugh than blow a gasket.
Literacy-challenged sceptics like the woman who can’t spell ‘science’ (above) are low-hanging fruit for every smart alec and Twitter troll out there, so instead let’s focus on some of the COVID-sceptical ‘arguments’ that have me yukking it up:
Nothing says ‘misinformation’ like a tweet from Donald Trump, now banned for harmful and misleading posts from both Facebook and Twitter. Amplified by COVID clowns like Trump and Alan Jones, this pernicious prevarication is provably wrong. At the time of writing, 4,456,380 people had died of COVID-19-related causes globally. That number is probably higher, given some countries’ propensity to understate their fatalities. In the US, the death rate from COVID-19 is 3.1 per cent of cases. This compares to the World Health Organisation’s estimated fatality rate from influenza of around 0.1 per cent. Clearly, COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu, in large part because we’re still in the process of distributing the vaccines necessary to curb its effects. If you haven’t already, get off your arse and get vaccinated.
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I won’t even bother debunking the Bill Gates microchip conspiracy theorists, who claim that COVID-19 is a made-up cover for a plan to implant trackable microchips and that the Microsoft co-founder is behind it. If your tin foil hat is wrapped around your head that tightly, you’re beyond help.
However, the “my kid got sick from COVID vaccine” yarns are more plausible and widely shared across social media, making them dangerous. True or not, these widely disseminated stories are in fact just a few cases retweeted a squillion times.
When specialists study the question of “how likely you are to get this sickness within 48 hours of getting a vaccine versus getting this sickness at any other time,” the answer always comes back as “neither more nor less likely.” On the positive side of the vaccination coin, you may have heard that (wait for it) Pfizer, AstraZeneca and the soon-to-be introduced Moderna vaccines give you a healthy dose of immunity from the worst ravages of COVID-19. It’s true, so taking vaccines is a no-brainer. Toss those horror stories from your Twitter feed in the digital recycle bin.
Don’t book an optometrist’s appointment; your eyes are not deceiving you. The woman on the left actually believes Jesus will save her from COVID-19. Just like He saved her ancestors from the Black Plague in the 14th century, or the Spanish Flu a century ago. Spoiler alert: He didn’t. Jesus (and deities from other religions, if that’s your thing) work in mysterious ways, it seems.
If you’re wondering why I’ve included our Prime Minister in the above graphic, it’s because he too has some, erm, ‘interesting’ religious beliefs, but it didn’t stop him getting vaccinated (above right) did it? Forgive the blasphemy, but when it comes to COVID-19, vaccination is your only salvation.
I’ll try to be polite here. Claims of “personal freedom” and “bodily autonomy” come to a screeching halt when your choices cause harm to others. Spreading a lethal illness like COVID-19 to otherwise vulnerable people by defying lockdowns, going maskless or refusing vaccine is nothing less than deadly assault. So, in this case, f*ck your freedom: my right to life trumps your right to be a selfish arsehole.
So that’s my coping strategy; some would say scoffing at the blindly ignorant is harsh, but I say that – in this stressed-out COVID-afflicted world of ours – it sure beats hitting police horses during anti-lockdown protests. I only have so much anger to go around, and I’d rather focus that on the commentators and people of influence who exploit these COVID-sceptical suckers while (in all likelihood) not believing a word of it. More on them below:
The COVID sceptics who fought police tooth and nail last weekend wouldn’t feel emboldened (and their delusions somehow ‘validated’) if someone wasn’t encouraging them. Like children convinced to believe in Father Christmas by grinning parents, or Churchgoers told by their local priest that the Immaculate Conception really happened (yes, really!) these people rely for their alternate reality on influencers, many of whom turn out to be nothing more than two-bit conmen.
Oddly enough, many of those influencers work for News Corp. Among them is that well-known proponent of law and order Andrew Bolt, who wrote that it was “good” the vast majority of beachgoers he counted near his Mornington Peninsula home last week were flouting mask rules (that is, breaking the law) and Alan Jones, who called the well-qualified NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant a village idiot and gave maverick MP Craig Kelly a Sky News platform to spread dangerous vaccine misinformation.
Does anyone seriously believe Bolt came within coughing distance of these supposed beachgoers, or that Jones isn’t champing at the bit for his second AstraZeneca jab (unctuous Alan admits to having had his first in late July)? “Do as I say, not as I do” is their mantra; they know what they’re peddling is harmful – sometimes, perhaps, even unlawful – but it’s so propitious, financially and vocationally, that they just don’t care.
This article was supposed to help me cope during lockdown, but the mere mention of Andrew Bolt has my blood boiling so I’ll stop. Anyone who’s read my stuff on Footyology knows that, post-lockdown, I’ll be back after these pricks soon enough!
In the meantime, its other forms of therapy for me: chores and gardening and dog walking and not yelling at the TV (Sydney play an elimination final this Saturday; how long do you think my quiescence will last?) The backyard is a bit of a sanctuary right now (alas, there’s no shed) and I thought I’d chop down an old Grevillea Robusta that has seen better days.
If mother lets me, of course. Wish me luck on that one.
