In the last 24 hours Victoria has had 14 new cases of COVID-19. Fourteen! Six weeks ago we had daily case numbers over 700. That’s an achievement largely unmatched anywhere in the world, and it’s happened because most people in Victoria accepted that some short term inconvenience was a fair price to pay to achieve it.
We haven’t had to cram into a bomb shelter every night during an eight month blitz. We haven’t seen the loss of essential services or the collapse of our society. We haven’t had to flee our homes. We haven’t been indefinitely locked up on some remote island shithole denied our basic rights. We haven’t experienced anything close to a dictatorship.
We haven’t all had to turn up to a press conference for 78 straight days attempting to keep people informed while reporters, whose job that is meant to be, behave like a pack of rabid dogs, barking every allegation and nut job conspiracy they can find at us, and when that fails to get a rise, attacking our family.
And we haven’t experienced the tens of thousands of case numbers, thousands of deaths or the impact on our health system and economy that many countries who refused to go into lockdown have suffered.
If current international events and social division is anything to go by 2020 could be the best year we have for the next decade. If we want a better future than that we need to keep being the sort of society most people in Victoria have been during this crisis.