VICTORIA: NEW YEAR'S EVE: No Dancing As The Virus Again takes The Floor
PANDEMIC WRITINGS, Melbourne, Australia (2020-2022): piece originally published December 30, 2020
On the eve of a New Year, we have the same Ol’ Tricksters up to their tried and untrue trickery…
After almost two months of zero community-transmitted cases of COVID-19 in Victoria, the rascally virus has supposedly “re-emerged,” with a total of six new cases in the last 48 hours. The timing is undeniably inconvenient, (or more aptly, “convenient”) much like the jarring North Beach “outbreak” that adversely impacted Christmas celebrations for New South Wales residents; inducing paranoia, ushering in lockdown measures, disrupting plans and reinserting “the pandemic reality” foremost in the minds of those ideally wanting to dissociate from the protracted trauma of COVID-19. And yet, the virus was cunningly invited into every household by the complicit media and took a prominent seat at every Christmas gathering — and pulled on an end of every Christmas cracker to rip the larger part of careless joy from the moment, offering a miserable joke as a consolation.
This was deliberate, strategic and artificially implemented: a necessary prelude to manipulate the greatest possible uptake of the forthcoming experimental vaccine.
And now, the same calculated psychological ploy is being enacted to disrupt Victoria’s New Year’s Eve celebrations: a hijacking of happiness as an exercise in vaccine ‘advance marketing.’ The latent trauma of our collective ‘COVID experience’ has been deliberately re-triggered; invoking anxiety, misgivings, paranoia and for some — a bleak prognosis of uncertainty and looming despair. A governmental decision has been made to prevent Victorians from feeling a degree of relief and normalcy this New Year’s Eve.
Rather than permitting Victorians to enter the New Year with a sense of carefree optimism, and to celebrate having seemingly eradicated the virus after enduring a dehumanising lockdown — we now must wear face-masks wherever we may find ourselves gathering tonight. The fact that a few days prior, Premier Dan Andrews’ bizarrely ‘banned kissing on New Year's Eve,’ both foreshadowed, and belied, that something sinister was pre-planned for the last day of 2020. Alas, the ‘Pandemic Reality’ is being shunted into prominence again — literally into and over our faces — and will dominate, and generate discussions that have again been infected by propaganda — thieving otherwise happier moments, while instilling a perpetual sense of a ‘new normal,’ and reaffirming a belief in an actual pandemic.
Again, the timing of the new “outbreak” is both inconvenient, yet suspiciously “convenient.”
Criminal.