The Victorian Lockdown and the Politicisation of the Corona Virus

Dear Friend,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the conversation we had about the Corona virus when we last spoke.

You mentioned a letter that Melbourne doctors had written to Daniel Andrews. As soon as I got back to my car I looked it up on my phone. And there it was at the top of the list of search results – from The Australian. The Australian is Murdoch’s flagship and I stopped reading it many years ago because I don’t believe a word they say. In the Australian context one of their primary goals is to bring down Labor governments everywhere, and they don’t let facts get in the way.

The next one on the list with mention of the doctor’s letter was Quadrant – a known right wing, conservative outlet. Interesting I thought. The only other reference to it was in The Chronicle – another Murdoch paper based in Queensland.

Then I searched the three media outlets that I regularly use to get my news – starting with The Melbourne Age.  Independent. Always has been The Age’s mantra for decades – and no mention of the letter.

So I checked the ABC – nothing. Then I checked the Guardian. Nothing. I eventually found the letter via Twitter at https://www.coviddoctorsnetwork.com/

I thought the letter itself was quite reasonable, and I’m not going to quibble with doctors who are working in this field.

But what worried me was the fact that The Age, The ABC, and the Guardian all had no mention of it. (And still don’t today a week later.)

Why not?? Do they think it’s fake news? Not worth mentioning? They don’t want to rock the boat, and present an alternative view? If that’s the case that would make them just as guilty of bias as the Murdoch press.

Whatever the reason it really worries me. In Australia now we are being fed news that is incredibly biased towards one side or another. If I read only the Age, the ABC and the Guardian I don’t even hear about this letter to Daniel Andrews. If I read the Murdoch press and watch commercial news or Skye news I am bombarded with it as part of their usual anti-Labor propaganda. And this is an example of how the whole COVID-19 issue has been politicised. Indeed just about every issue in Australia gets politicised in this same way. Unless you are making a conscious effort to consume news from a range of media outlets you risk being subject to propaganda and I think Australia is in real trouble here.

And of course filling in the gaps is the uninformed and opinionated morass of social media to further muddy the waters ….

Something else you said at our last meeting seemed to suggest that you didn’t think the reports of mass graves of people dying from COVID-19 or mobile freezers in NY being used to help out collecting the mounting number of dead bodies were true.  This quite stunned me. 

For the record, media outlets from all sides of politics provide lots of references to what happened in NYC:

NY Bodies

• https://www.the-sun.com/news/609961/freezer-truck-bodies-ny-hospital-coronavirus/
• https://www.foxnews.com/us/coronavirus-nyc-temporary-interment-city-parks-bodies-freezes-new-york-outbreak
• https://abcnews.go.com/Health/nycs-grim-contingency-coronavirus-deaths-rise-temporary-mass/story?id=70008187
• https://theintercept.com/2020/04/22/coronavirus-morgue-new-york-city/

And similarly there are countless stories on mass graves for COVID victims from all sides of the political spectrum. I started searching stories about Brazil, but then found reference to similar situations in Bolivia, Iran and even the UK.

BRAZIL

• https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/brazil-manaus-coronavirus-mass-graves
• https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-how-brazil-became-the-second-worst-affected-country-in-the-world-141102
• https://www.businessinsider.com.au/photos-brazil-mass-graves-experts-anticipate-covid-19-deaths-2020-5?r=US&IR=T
• https://www.macaubusiness.com/brazil-buries-covid-19-victims-in-mass-graves-in-manaus/

BOLIVIA

UK

IRAN 

I mentioned an article from NZ that I found useful. It helped me realise that as a lay person my opinion on all of this is not worth much. It is just that – an opinion. And an unqualified one at that! The article, from a Professor of Epidemiology, is here if you’re interested.

The original letter from the 13 Victorian doctors has now garnered in excess of 500 signatures supporting their position. But I do wonder what the other 30,000 plus Victorian doctors think …

For all our sakes let’s hope that Victoria is soon through this nightmare.

Aging and Sadness

 

I’ve been looking at old photographs and have been quite moved by the fact that everyone looks so much younger – my wife and I, our children, friends, even our parents – everyone! Everyone looks so beautifully youthful. And there’s a tinge of sadness as I contemplate all the years that have passed and I’m trying to work out why.

It’s not as if those years have been filled with tragedy – quite the opposite in fact. There have been sad times but overall life for me has been full of joy and wonder. So the sadness is not rooted in any disappointment about the past. It seems to revolve squarely around the fact that

I am not young anymore.

Why is there inherent sadness in this fact? I am not sick, or about to die. In all likelihood I have many years of health left to enjoy the time ahead. But I have less time than I used to. Is that it? That I can longer pretend that the end is far off in a distant future?

Is the quality of ‘young’ intrinsically better than oldness? Is it somehow better to look young and youthful than it is to look old and a little weathered? And if so, why? Looking older of course is a constant reminder that you’re time is limited, or that you have been around for many years. There’s a sense of loss in there – a loss of a feeling of invincibility; loss of that feeling that there is lots of time left to enjoy people and places.

One could see this as positive – I enjoy my life. I have no reason to want it to end. I want it to go on for as long as possible. I could count my blessings. (I do.) But still the sadness of aging lingers. Is it because I don’t look young? That I feel a little irrelevant to the generation before me? That I am adjudged to be in some sense passed it?

You do however sometimes hear people my age talk about the advantages of being over 60. And I totally subscribe to this. There is something really pleasurable about knowing who you are; knowing what you think; having fewer doubts; knowing that you can express opinions better than ever before. And maybe even that you think more clearly than you ever did. But would I rather be younger with the accompanying angst that comes with it? Probably. Why? Because that would mean I had more time.

So it’s the shorter timeframe thing again. I look back on those photographs and am reminded that I probably won’t have another 30 years of memories. But who can tell? I may well. There may be decades of memories left to create and in 30 years I could be looking back at photos I took today. And what – feeling even sadder because I’ll be even older?

And in the background Gordon Lightfoot coincidentally sings:

It’s cold on the shoulder; and you know that we get a little older every day!

When I was 23 I returned home from 14 months travelling overseas. A family aunt asked my on my return, “Apart from feeling a little wiser and a little sadder, how was your journey?” I asked why she assumed I would be sadder and she said no one ever came home from that kind of journey without being sadder. In her view it was as if having such an out of the ordinary experience was ipso facto  going to result in a degree of sadness. In time I came to agree with her.

Over the years I have learned too that sadness is quite a precious emotional state and is closely related to a sense of beauty and appreciating the things we care about. So I’m not disheartened by the idea of being sad when looking at my past, or because I’m so much older now. I think there is a sadness attached to growing older but it doesn’t have to be debilitating. I’m just trying to disentangle the roots of that sadness. But in the meantime, as Don Henley and Merle Haggard sang:

Wear it like a royal crown when you get old and grey.
It’s the cost of living, and everyone pays.