No-one is coming for me

I haven’t been avoiding COVID-19 stuff, just what can you say? We lost a year of our lives to idiocy, mismanagement, a virus. This video from Caitlin Doughty aka Ask A Mortician sums up the desperation for parts of the world that are hardest hit and government doesn’t seem to care. Nowhere to be found. Let’s wave from a helicopter as people sink under the waves in a happy photo-op reassuring the rest it is fine. This is fine. It’s OK.

IT. IS. STILL. NOT. OK.

I said this nearly a year ago about the ‘new normal‘ being a crock of shit and you should never accept it – but it seems many have. This is not right, and it seems those hardest hit still aren’t getting any help and people go on with their Zoom Zumba classes and Sea Shanties and Bernie memes. I get it, we all need escape – sometimes.

But you can’t avoid a pandemic and people need help now. Usually the ones with least and no safety net via systemic racism and classism and a shitload of other stuff. We all feel desperate but as the meme puts it, some say we are in the same boat but actually some of us are in a luxury yacht, some of us are in a small leaky dinghy frantically bailing, and some of us are in the water, drowning.

She put it best:

“This is like a scene from a disaster movie where a plane flies over and doesn’t see you and you realize, oh shit, no one is coming for me!”

Caitlin Doughty – Ask A Mortician

Where are they? Where is the government? Sadly I have experience of this – the HIV pandemic – and yes, they don’t care about queer/black/brown/poor people. The one thing ‘Ye was ever right about.

It has been a year. They – both sides of the pond – have been very hands-off with telling anyone about when they get vaccines – leave that to a third party site to estimate it! In the UK they let the virus in and only NOW in the UK are they closing the borders and enforcing quarantine. A bit fucking late?

Test and trace and the mixed messages to people they have been an absolute farce. ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ but don’t meet up with friends….and whoops there goes the infection rate! Have a joyful Xmas but actually don’t. And I know from personal experience that self-employed people mostly got nothing because of their restrictions – whereas furloughed companies and corporates got billions. And the mates of those corrupt people in power got hand-outs in dodgy PPE and test and trace deals where they did not deliver, whereas most people have got diddly squat.

And to cap it all, some people cannot even bury their dead? Or have to pay through the nose to do that in their time of greatest need. What the fuck?

I said this nearly a year ago. I was right – I was told, as usual, I was being ‘dramatic’ but actually this all went the way I thought it would, bar the bog roll. It was all so depressingly obvious and so depressingly predictable. 100,000 dead later – and that is the low-ball figure, and 400,000 in the States. See also Brexit.

Maybe if I shout it with a really large font you might actually take notice?

WHY ARE YOU STILL NOT ANGRY?