By John Stapleton
The national derangement was complete.
A Melbourne hospital prevented a mother from seeing her son, who was suffering from a severe brain injury after a motor crash.
“We haven’t been able to see our son since he woke up from a coma.. We just want to hug our son.”
Police were filmed arresting and pepper‐spraying a bunch of ratbag kids, average age perhaps twelve, after one of them refused to wear a mask into a shop and the rest gave them a bit of lip.
The largely deserted working‐class shopping mall saw yet another conflagration between police and the citizenry; every last one of the tweens involved under age.
They might have been too young to legally have sex, but they weren’t too young to be pepper‐sprayed and arrested in what the authorities had been assuring us was the new COVID normal.
This was the unravelling. . This was one of the cascading moments in time, in that kaleidoscope of incidents, when the authorities lost control of their own behaviour, the public lost all faith in the authorities, and the official narrative lost all credibility.
A man was fined $5000 for drinking a cup of takeaway coffee in the street, in the remote central Australian town of Alice Springs. Surrounded by some of the world’s most beautiful desert country, there was not, and had never been, a single solitary case of Corona in the town. . Footage shows the man being wrestled to the ground and his coffee spilling onto the street.
This is the hell you created.
There is an old Jesuit saying, “Set the world alight!”
Well, so you did.. But how can anyone bow down to these false, lunatic gods?
The Prime Minister told the country he was on his “prayer knees”. The result: the rest of the country was enduring an End Time delusion.
Twelve million in lockdown for the panicked fear of a disease few had any chance of catching, and those who did, an even remoter chance of dying from. How is that not the Angel of Death? How is not a national derangement? How is this not The Origins of Totalitarianism?
Where the darkest of Lords reap the souls of men.
The actions of the Australian authorities impugned through our every sense of self; of the familiarity and comfort of routines which humans establish by their very nature.
As many other writers had commented; there was a strange spirituality to the season, a dangerous dementia of the occult; or so it often felt.
And in all of this, this utterly lunatic time, there was the absolute immediate consequence; of lives and futures destroyed.
***
Close to home, Old Alex’s local café, The Village Fix, was shut after the owner was arrested for not wearing a mask; the dozen or so police coordinating, apparently, with the local daily newspaper, The Illawarra Mercury, to make sure the dramatic scenes were splashed all over their front page..
The paper breathlessly reported that some people were frightened to come into town because someone wasn’t wearing a mask. . There might have been little or no scientific evidence that masks were effective in stop-ping the spread of COVID, but they were very good at instilling fear and a heightened sense of danger into a population; in manufacturing a psychic derangement..
Officers fined owner Anthony Reale, 41, $1000 for not wearing a face mask or ensuring that three of his employees wore masks..
His wife, Natalie, mother of three young children, was also arrested.. “We have been put through the wringer,” she said.. “Now we have to deal
with all the expense of courts and lawyers.. We have done nothing wrong.. It was a setup.. Putting us on the front page has meant we have had threats; as have other organic stores who have adopted the same stance..
“What sort of police involve themselves in activities against ordinary citizens which can lead to them being threatened, to endangering my family like this?
“None of the stories mention the struggles of small business, or that have some mask exemptions, which are very bad for some people’s health..
“We have quite a bit of support across the world. Cafes from across Australia and America have messaged us; and we have also had threats; but the support outweighs the threats.. We have been dragged through hell; I was treated like a dog.”
NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Gary Worboys said the cafe was flagrantly disregarding COVID‐19 protocols..
“There was an absolute clear resistance from the cafe owner and those people at front-of-house to actually wear a mask,” Mr Worboys said.. “It is clearly irresponsible.”
What was clearly irresponsible policing in this derangement spreading through the entire society was the destruction of perfectly decent people’s lives and livelihoods; their public shaming, exposing a family with young children to public threat.
Wherever Old Alex happened to be, he frequented the earliest opening cafe, which is how he got to know the family which ran Village Fix.. You couldn’t find more decent, harder‐working people.. And just like him, they didn’t believe the government narrative either.
What was truly irresponsible was the amount of stress government functionaries were placing on ordinary citizens; a derangement of the era causing scenes of conflict between citizens and police right across the country.
***
The veneer of civilisation proved virus‐thin. The consequences of lock-downs and the remaking of Australian society would spill down the generations.. The derangement that took over the political class and the absolute mismanagement of the COVID crisis, beginning in early 2020, would seriously damage the welfare of hundreds of thousands of families; and mark the nation’s descent into a totalitarian hell.. For out of the humus of that destructive time, new kinds of leaders and forms of government would arise.. A new kind of apartheid; a new kind of mass psychosis would reshape a subjugated population, the towns, the communities, families, the isolated and the much loved, transforming the way Australians inter-acted and cared for each other. The era would birth a new kind of cruelty.
And those who inherited this future would wonder, above all else, how could anyone of conscience have let this happen?
