WE MUST LIFT LOCKDOWN BY JUNE 1ST!

We must lift the lockdown with immediate effect which means we should aim for June the 1^st. Meanwhile we should allow people to move around freely from a social perspective. Over the next 2 weeks businesses and other organisations should prepare themselves to open.

This requires leadership and courage. Our leaders must balance the risks and the  implications of all options. Any sensible scrutiny will establish two things. Firstly that we can’t afford to keep the economy locked down and that it must be opened up fully, not partially. Secondly that the people will not agree with you initially because of the level of hysteria that has been generated in the past two months. We must all dig deep and have courage but the leaders must lead. They don’t have the luxury as has become common practice to check if the people will agree with them before doing anything.

The initial reaction by governments was understandable. People wanted action and they needed to do something to satisfy that demand. This led to a natural exaggeration of the situation as always happens. It’s a product of the circumstance. However it was fairly quickly clear that the predictions that millions of people would die from the virus were grossly overstated.

We also know from experience that the assumptions that these models are predicated on are historically hugely overstated. We just have to go back to Ebolla, SARS and AIDS to evidence this.

Therefore these predictions should have been treated with a cautionary note. Once it became clear from the current data that the virus was far less lethal than originally suggested and that the pockets of concern should have been focused around the elderly and those with underlying conditions that is what we should have done.

Instead governments not only persisted with the original strategy but kept adding elements to it gradually. We then had classic hysteria where the threats got exaggerated, people were no longer thinking rationally and everyone had convinced themselves they were satisfying the needs of the other.

This is how society becomes despotic. Out of this we get the power hungry, the opportunists, the virtue signallers and an entire cast of characters who now have a stake in the game. So it didn’t start out as a conspiracy but ends up performing like one.

As a result governments became all powerful but without adequate scrutiny. The press merely echo and amplify their message. The result is no one is asking if what they are doing is right. Is it worth putting us under house arrest for, wrecking the economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses, imposing debt on future generations and causing a massive increase in the rate of heart disease, stress, suicide, alcoholism etc. all of which is leading to an enormous loss of life and future demands on the health system which will dwarf anything that is currently going on.

Eventually we end up with a society where there a lot more controls and rules that we need to abide by. This is a serious erosion of our freedoms and all because we got the initial diagnosis wrong and then compounded it by not taking proper cognisance of the current data as it was being generated.

Governments do not admit when they’re wrong and once they have put a control in place they never give it back. Airport security is the most blatant example of this. In it’s present form airport security is completely ineffective. It’s original implementation was based on the exact same type of hysteria that has driven the reaction to this virus. Everybody knows it but neither governments nor the people are prepared to address it. The vested interest groups such as the retailers, security providers, pension funds etc. all lobby to make sure that this doesn’t happen. After all airports are really now shopping centers where we park planes as well as cars.

The same outcome is already evident as a result of the virus except it will be of much greater significance to our society than airport security. The controls we are now allowing them to impose on us are curfews depending on what age you are, when you can socialize with friends and relatives, various forms of screening, carrying additional documentation validating your health status etc. etc. We have already seen how this will manifest itself with examples of overreach by the police and neighbours reporting on each other. These are the influences which ultimately lead to us no longer living in a free society and which give way to despotism.

All of this is before we factor in the destruction of our economy. Despite the lip service being paid to it by some this is clearly being ignored by the policy makers. It’s very simple. We can’t afford a lock down. If you buy a house you can’t afford or a car you can’t afford it usually ends up that either the bank comes to take the house or the car from you or you lose a lot of money and other things suffer.

Why would our politicians or for that matter the rest of us think this will be any different. You can’t blame the politicians if we give them a ringing indorsement at every opportunity. The reason is that both we and the politicians are treating it like tomorrows problem. We pass no more than a cursory acknowledgement of it’s impending consequences.

Virtually every crisis gets a response that is driven by mass hysteria. It is also accompanied by poor decision making. Why those who specialize in crisis management don’t evidence this sufficiently in their studies is a wonder to me.

Battening down the hatches is the easy bit. In the financial crisis they did that and gave nothing to anybody except exiting politicians, bankers and overseas vulture funds. Once again the government have locked everything and everybody up and people are clapping them on the back. Now when they have to do the hard bit suddenly their only strategy is to take it slowly.

In doing this they have turned the police into henchmen of the state rather than citizens in uniform. Ordinary people are acting like glorified school prefects and we are cheering them on.

Instead they need to look and see what the scientists have said and draw their own conclusions. They must take back control of the country from the health authorities who are way beyond their areas of expertise or experience.

There are too many eminent scientists and doctors speaking out against the current practises and using the data to back up their findings to ignore it. It’s not just opinion. This is not being given the credence it should be.

One other feature of every crisis is that those in charge never trust the people. People not only need to be trusted but to take more personal responsibility. We give out about the nanny state but in a way it suits us to expect everything from the politicians and then blame them accordingly. We have forgotten how to stand up and be counted. This is abdication on our part too.

We can’t afford this lockdown at any level. It doesn’t matter who’s right. We can’t afford the car.  It will destroy us all. We have all worked too hard to recover from 2008 to throw it away now because we don’t have the courage and are not prepared to make the hard decisions.

Come on Ireland.