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??
Yes. And you ask us when it will end.
To which we ask you, when are you willing to storm the Bastille?
Americans understand this. Next week the Supreme Court WILL strike down the vaccine mandate. But we intuitively know what would happen if they did not. What would happen if ALL civil means of disagreeing with the policy were exhausted. That all would be left would be uncivil means, and people would start dying. And when a whole third of the country is saying "fuck no", it would get messy fast.
The only reason America isn't already torn apart in civil war is the belief that the system still works despite an incompetent executive and an absentee legislature.
A lot of people think the most important person to stand up is the first person.
It's not. It's the second person. The simple fact is that people are fucking cowards and will only do things if they know that their peers will back them up.
This. Often I've been the only person in the building standing up, it's when there's a second also doing it that then a third finds their spine and then a fourth and so on.