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THE BIGGEST MISTAKE OF ALL

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By Andy Oakley

In the face of the COVID-19 virus, despite warnings, Jacinda Ardern used the results of grossly overstated models and decided to move from a managing strategy to an elimination strategy. This was despite in the entire history of the world and the many thousands of viruses we have, only one has ever been eliminated, smallpox.

The elimination strategy meant that she would need to ignore the economic fallout and put New Zealand into one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. Most of our western neighbours went nowhere near that level of destruction of their people’s freedoms. They cared more, they thought more, and they reacted with more caution.

Where was the opposition to this, one of the biggest errors in our entire history?

To cancel out any opposition to what she was doing, Ardern stood before the nation and told us that unless she went through with this madness, 80,000 people would die. That took courage, it was a very big call, but she and her party should have been aware, scaring people is the opposite of what good leadership is about.

After that sort of alarmism and public indoctrination cheered on by the mainstream media, it took more than a month for National and Simon Bridges to get up enough courage to, just today, meekly suggest that “the cure may cause more harm than the disease”. This was because when Bridges first questioned her awfully thought out plan she put him in his place so hard, he might have preferred to come down with the virus than face that sort of tyrannical challenge to his manliness, or lack of it, again.

It wasn’t just the public, even the opposition benches had lost their right to free speech. Well perhaps not their rights but certainly any ability to oppose the slide into tyranny, the public would have them for breakfast.

They should have tried and tried hard, too much was at stake, this is bigger than any one persons political career.

Unfortunately, after a month of no opposition, much of the economic damage has already been done. And just in case it hadn’t, Ardern added another week, stating that unless the public follows our oppressive and draconian ‘lockdown laws’ that it could be another month!

Suck it up!

However, what we also have to suck up is, according to the OECD, this huge gaff will result in an economic decline of about 30%, one of the biggest declines in economic activity in the world. Treasury forecast unemployment of 13%, adding a further 260,000 people to the dole ques.

For businesses, the businesses that employ the nation, they face either bankruptcy or at the very least a loss of most, if not all of the equity they may have built up in their businesses. In some cases, decades of hard toil, taken from them without even a whimper of opposition.

So, we find ourselves in the most awful of positions, too scared to go to work, and too broke not too.

I suggest that neither Labour or National will want an election anytime soon, that surely is a measure of the level of thought and political leadership we have in New Zealand at present.

 

Oh we did do it better back then

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Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags, because plastic bags are not good for the environment,.
The woman apologized to the young girl and explained, “We didn’t have this ‘green thing’ back in my earlier days.”
The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
The older lady said that she was right our generation didn’t have the “green thing” in its day. The older lady went on to explain: Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.
But we didn’t have the “green thing” back in our day. Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.
But, too bad we didn’t do the “green thing” back then. We walked up stairs because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the “green thing” in our day.
Back then we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throw away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days.
Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the “green thing” back in our day.
Back then we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.
In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us.
When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power.
We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the “green thing” back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blade in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the “green thing” back then.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service in the family’s $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did before the “green thing.”
We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.
But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the “green thing” back then?
Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart ass young person. We don’t like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much to piss us off… Especially from a tattooed, multiple pierced smartass who can’t make change without the cash register telling them how much.