PJs, Toast and Hijacked Vigils
Monday March 15, 2021
Much has been made recently (including by ourselves) of the effects of forcing children to wear masks in schools. In particular regarding the results on mental health – but this is not limited to children. We already know that continual lockdowns will have an adverse effect on adults as well.
Doctor Max Pemberton, an NHS psychiatrist, has written of the long term damage being done to people working from home. He writes:
‘The structure of work – having to start and finish at certain times, is useful. [Working from home] it’s all too easy for the working day to bleed into the evening and weekends. The virus has taken away something incredibly important that we have rarely thought about: our ability to interact.
‘It might sound daft, but one of the most important things we do at work isn’t work. We are gregarious animals – interacting with each other…is incredibly important for our emotional well-being.’
Doctor Pemberton is right. We need the social discourse, as bumpy as it might be from time to time, to help us through each day, both at work and at home. This loss is just one of the hidden costs of government overreaction and panic to COVID-19 and is has to stop.
Rolling out of bed and sitting on your sofa in your PJs with tea, toast and a laptop might sound appealing but long term it is not sustainable psychologically (and sitting on a sofa with a laptop is also bad for one’s back).
And Another Thing –
We have, for some years now, seen protests hijacked by those with a vested interest. From the poll tax riots of 1989/1990 to almost every protest since, various elements have wormed their way into them in order to foment violence and destruction.
Watching videos of people jumping up and down and chanting at the vigil for Sarah Everard was somewhat unedifying – a vigil is not supposed to be like that. Given that it was, we are bound to ask; were all those present really there to pay a silent tribute to a murder victim? We think not. It is thus not really a surprise that the police eventually responded but the big question is, was the police response proportionate? We believe that it was not.
Front line officers are in an impossible situation – they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. But even though, human nature being what it is, there will always be rogue police officers here and there, the majority of coppers just want to do what’s right. The problem does not lie there. It lies higher up the chain of command, where senior officers are more akin to politically-correct appointees than honest officers who worked their way up from the beat. It is senior officers who must be telling the government that its actions, directives and undemocratic actions are failing both the police and the public.
Image - Michelle Theil
© KJM Today 2021