Friday, March 29, 2024

Life, but not as we knew it

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I suspect most of us now want our lives to return to normal.

However, a line has been crossed that makes such a sentiment a complete mockery of what we have been forced to endure over the last couple of years.

If we are aching to get back to the lives we once knew, it’s because we once remember taking it for granted that the traditional legal conventions of our nation guaranteed not just our freedom but held that it was misappropriation of government power that these protections guarded us against.

This assurance has been broken: we blinked. Bamboozled by a manufactured crisis, we let errant representatives, in collusion with news media, strip us of our credulity to play us off against one another and coerce our compliance.

Nothing more forcefully reveals our profound shallowness than a misguided determination now to preserve our fantasies about what we thought the world was before we were locked down.

But the wound done to our personal agency is now so profound that unless there is a wide-ranging independent commission into the pandemic, with the power to subpoena and indict government officials, we risk far greater future abuses from an emboldened, unaccountable State.

Rees Sutcliffe
East Tamaki Heights

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