We Don’t Know How Lucky We Are, Mate

Every other day lately I find myself wishing that people could simply stop whining.

Granted we are having to forego a number of our normal activities and most of us are suffering financial hardship of some sort. However, we are not alone in this. Most of our fellow countrymen are and so are most people all over the world.

In case some of the “media people” have missed it; we are experiencing a global pandemic, and this is not something we can attribute to poor governance (in New Zealand anyway). Out in the real world we have to work with the cards we are dealt and at the moment the Universe has dealt us a pretty shitty handful.

But just as whining at the dealer about the cards you have been dealt will make no difference to whether you win the hand, so whining about this pandemic will not make it magically go away.

I am rapidly becoming of the opinion that there are two basic types of people in the world: idiots and the rest of us. Idiots keep on doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome each time, and the rest of us do the best we possibly can with what we have, and when a situation like this pandemic happens, we stop and look at the bigger picture and take the opportunity to change all the things that weren’t working in the “old” world.

In other words, an event like this which causes us to have to cease a lot of our previous behaviours for a period of time, is an opportunity for us to reset and try something different. A very good example of this is those airline pilots who have decided to become operators of farm machinery now that their flying careers are “up in the air”, (boom boom!). That is the sort of thing many of us will need to do in order to survive this situation as best as we can.

I realise that major changes to one’s lifestyle can be scary, and I should know, as I have had to reinvent myself, career-wise on many occasions throughout my life. I am also no stranger to unemployment and the financial stress that brings while trying to meet the weekly cost of keeping a roof over your family’s head and food on the table with what appears to be insufficient funds to do that with. In that sort of environment, we have to sit down and work out our priorities, by which I mean the things that are VITAL for our survival and we simply have to do without the rest until things improve.. It is now time for people to identify their NEEDS and concentrate on them, and for the time being, ignore their WANTS. One of the biggest problems with our Pre-Covid society was that far too many of our people couldn’t distinguish their NEEDS from their WANTS and in that environment they kept making dumb decisions that made their lives far more difficult than they needed to be. If we ignore or abandon that which we really don’t need right now, we likely will soon realise that we didn’t really need a lot of those things that we previously THOUGHT were important anyway.

I am heartily sick of turning on the radio and hearing (shock, horror) that this or that industry is experiencing a major downturn in business during this pandemic. Oh really? And here was silly old me thinking that closing down the borders and limiting economic activity would make us all wealthy beyond our dreams! And what bugs me the most is that every one of these whiners thinks they are hard done by and (apparently) that nobody else is. We are ALL suffering to some degree or another in this situation and trying to get the borders re-opened is not going to fix it.

I heard a nitwit being interviewed by Jack Tame on Q&A on Sunday (no I don’t mean Whinny; I mean another nitwit altogether). The bloke I am referring to heads up some stupid organisation that reckons we should open up the borders because we didn’t need to close down like we did. When challenged by Jack Tame to name another country that had not followed our example but had done very well under the pandemic, the best he could do was to point us to Iceland.

FFS! This just serves to show how unhinged this bloke is. A quick look at the Worldometer site which tracks all the Covid 19 stats by country in a way that you can compare apples with apples, shows just how much NeoCon bullshit this bloke is peddling.

Iceland has a population of around 350,000 compared to our 5,000,000 and yet they still have nearly 300 more cases than we do and when you compare their stats of 6267 cases per million of population with our figure of 354 per million and their death stats of 24 per million with our 5 per million you don’t need to be a mathematical genius to realise that Iceland is not a great example to prove that nitwit’s claims. If we had their figures we would have had more than 31,000 cases and 145 dead. So how would that have been a better idea then?

I see some other equally stupid people used Sweden as an example of another country that “did well” while not doing the sort of lockdown that we did. Once again, this is complete bollox, as Sweden, whose population is only twice that of ours, has had 85,000 cases when it should have had less than 3,500 if it was doing better than us. They have had 8405 cases per million of population and 577 deaths per million of population. If we had done that badly we would have had 42,000 cases and 2769 deaths.

It is time that we pulled together as a country and co-operated to get ourselves out of this mess. This means doing our individual bit to look after ourselves as best we can and recognise that means we will need to reset our priorities and try some innovative new ways to earn a living or save on our outgoings.

This is a great time to reduce the amount of selfishness that has plagued our society and the world in general for far too long. Panic buying is not an innovative way of dealing with this situation and neither is moaning about what we can’t do due to the lockdown or refusing to maintain physical distancing or wear masks in crowded environments. These are examples of the worst possible kind of selfishness one might expect to see from 2-year-olds rather than adults.

And the Government is NOT responsible for this pandemic and while it will obviously do much to ease our economic pain, it will not and cannot possibly cover everything and completely protect us from the outfall. We also have to do our bit, which includes following the instructions we are given to protect ourselves and others.

I would ask every whiner to consider moving to the USA, or Brazil, or the UK if they think they are hard done by in this country. No matter what you might think of this Government or the way it has been handling this pandemic, it is abundantly clear to all but the terminally stupid, that they have done a far better job of manging this thing that any other Government in the developed world.

As the late, great John Clarke famously said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” While our luck is in we should all get ourselves a lottery ticket