Hard Right and Left in bizarre, daft agreement

Despite the plethora of sophisticated communications available to us, the healthy, privileged first world view is the single myopic perspective.

An employee moves coffins, some marked with "infection risk" as others have "corona" scrawled in chalk, in the mourning hall of the crematorium in Meissen, eastern Germany last month. Picture: AFP

It is a paradox of the times that despite the plethora of sophisticated communications available to us, the healthy, privileged first world view is the single myopic perspective through which many Australians see the world. This is the case whether we are talking about climate change, population, or lately, the pandemic. One would have thought that a pandemic would be free of political and ideological baggage, but unfortunately, like most other issues in our narrowly focused first world, it has become an ideological issue.

Now this is not of course the attitude of the vast majority of Australians, nor the official “party line” of either side. But the dark green/Left and dark blue/Right spectrum is becoming more variegated. As is the way with most extreme ideologies, the two ends of the spectrum are not so different. They sort of meet at both ends. So, the tunnel-visioned hard Right anti-lock-downers, the “give me liberty or give me death” crowd are throwing in their lot with the equally tunnel-visioned green-Left anti-vaxxers, who like many on the hard Right are deep into conspiracies of social control.

The far Right in Australia, while railing against restrictions, querying the bona fides of the epidemiologists who set them in place, and with some justification the politicians charged with enacting them, are usually not so stupid as to pretend the pandemic doesn’t exist, although some of them and some on the green/Left do. This Orwellian fantasy is mystifyingly persistent. However, these people, like many of us, have nevertheless taken our world-class medical system and easy access to vaccination for granted. Consequently, most Right-wing libertarians are fully vaccinated despite railing against compulsory vaccination. They continue to argue that hardly anyone dies from Covid, rather they die with it, and they have all sorts of pointless statistics to back up this amoral and heartless viewpoint, which also has the effect of making the young, fit and well libertarians feel somewhat superior.

Ditto, for the green/Left. The anti-vaxxers who, while refusing vaccination, or railing against compulsory vaccinations as much as the Right, are smugly assuming they won’t get sick, end up in hospital, or God forbid, die. Some of them are using bogus conditions to avoid it or, waiting for a particular type of vaccine. Naturally, the vegans among them are of course immune to things that might fell the rest of us. And for both sides the response to the pandemic, especially lockdown, is mere “hysteria”, a plot to “steal” our liberties.

The anti-vaxxers who, while refusing vaccination, or railing against compulsory vaccinations as much as the Right, are smugly assuming they won’t get sick. Picture: Nev Madsen.

We can tolerate this conspiratorial paranoia, or indeed the sheer stupidity of all the ideological, illogical sound and fury coming from both sides as perhaps mildly eccentric, especially when coming from someone who is young, healthy, double vaccinated, with access to optimum medical facilities living in a wealthy milieu. But more than 700,000 people in the richest, most freedom-loving country in the world have died of Covid-19. Most of them were at the bottom end of the US economic and social spectrum, with limited access to good health care and indeed many of them might have had comorbidities one of which, obesity, rarely affects our rich young freedom-loving friends with carefully balanced diets and gym memberships.

But even in western Europe in countries where everyone has free medicine such as Italy, the first European country to experience the pandemic, cases are now rising – and so are deaths. Unfortunately, they too have a large population with comorbidities, in fact the biggest comorbidity of all – old age. In just one small village in central Italy, I know one person who has died and two who were told they would have died if they had not been vaccinated. But why care about someone else’s old nonnas?

And then there are the parts of the world most of us do not know. Countries such as India, where people were fighting for oxygen cylinders, and thousands of children are left orphans because of the disease. Perhaps the libertarian Right and the equally conspiratorial green/Left could spare a thought for those children when they toddle off unmasked and vaccinated to their favourite cafe. Then there is Africa which hasn’t enough vaccine for its populations. But why think so far from home? While condemning the Premier of Western Australia for keeping his state “locked up” our anti-lock downers might think about the Indigenous population in that state. Of course, they live in that other world. They are only nominally in our first world.

So, the terrible suffering of so many all over the world should not only be merely acknowledged it should humble us by its sheer enormity. It deserves a far more compassionate and indeed pragmatic approach to the pandemic than all the empty ideological trumpeting.

Of course, the world’s suffering also includes all of us who have willingly and pragmatically given up some of our freedom to protect ourselves, families and fellow Australians. We are not sheep; we are not a complacent unthinking population, nor should we be captured by empty ideologies. We are a free, rich and happy people and we have used that freedom not as the libertarians would have us use it, to flout the rules and scoff at the acknowledged experts, but to protect our families and fellow citizens from sickness and possible death. Every single one of us who, without grumbling, stayed at home when we were asked, wore a mask when we had to, taught the children when we had to, refrained from seeing our children and grandchildren, worked shifts in hospitals and nursing homes, and despite grief missed a funeral, are the ordinary people who were doing the right thing. And indeed, sometimes, in a small individual way, the heroic thing.