Anyone else notice this?
Fairly unsubstantiated post, based on personal experience, and on what I am seeing elsewhere.
As a "not fully vaccinated" person, society is closing in, increasingly. I am barely allowed to participate in goings-on, anymore. My family shuns and shames me. My "friends" have essentially abandoned me. Shit is getting very, very real, now...
Mask mandates are ubiquitous, across 6 or 7 out of the Australian jurisdictions, including the one I am stuck in. Vaccine mandates, too. I'm not allowed to work. I essentially can't "go out". In another state, they want to make mandates apply in supermarkets, too, so you essentially won't be able to buy food...
"Social distancing" is also ubiquitously still in place. Businesses are closing EVERYWHERE, because they can't make money. Governments are constantly threatening "new lockdowns" and curfews, because, duhh, Omicron, means rising case numbers. It's genuinely scary to see where things are going...
Aside from not currently being in lockdown, we are currently the most restricted we have ever been. Ever. Especially if you are "unvaccinated", or, increasingly, unboosted...
Very soon, people like me won't even be able to enter a university campus, or even study online. Can't work, can't study. Logic...
And people ABSOLUTELY lap this up. Media coverage is UNIVERSALLY for more restrictions. Almost everyone I know, and encounter "IRL" is all for it. As is the entirety of local Reddit, aside from, obviously, the "critical" or "skeptical" subs. Worse than that, if you question ANY element of it, you are shamed, ostracised, demonized, treated worse than dirt. Why?
I know this isn't the case everywhere. Not in Red states. Not in Mexico, per se. Not in Japan. Not in parts of Eastern Europe, or Africa, or elsewhere. But it is, here. It IS, in NZ. It IS in Blue states. It IS in the UK, and in France, and in Germany, and in Austria, and in the Netherlands. Some of those places are even more extreme than where I am, despite less compliant populations, and lower vaxx rates...
When, and how does this end?? Next year will almost certainly be worse. In fact, for me personally, I 100% guarantee it will be.
When will people wake up? Will they ever?? What the fuck are we going to do?? How do we actually push back? I'm genuinely beginning to think that this WON'T end, because people simply do not want it to, so... Where do we go from here??
In a most of other places I'd say fight it, but Australia sounds like a lost cause. I think you should seriously consider the idea that this will never end. It won't be covid forever, but it will get transitioned to something else, like climate change. People will continue to go along with no resistance.
Can you get out of Oz? Get to the US somehow? I've heard that travel is restricted, but are their any loopholes? Sounds like your whole life is there, but will it be much of a life of you stay? If your family has ostracized you, what good is staying with them?
The good guys are on the ropes here in the US, but we have strongholds, and people willing to fight.
Do we want another free rider?
We already know he'd grumble "Hail Caesar" rather than be nailed to the cross. Is that the sort of person we want?
He's held out from getting jabbed this long in the most hostile territory in the west, against pressure from his whole family. I'd say that makes him better than at least 75% of Americans.
I'd be happy that we take in someone who actually wants to work and be part of society than yet another freeloader walking across the Southern Border.
False binary. How about not taking in anybody.