A few weeks? Yes, just until the second wave of the Covid-19 virus hits, and we have to go back into our bubbles because we came out of lockdown too soon.
Don't mention the lives that could be lost; just talk monetary cost.
See, if you're a card-holding neoliberal it's now become mandatory to put a monetary value on human life. Figures ranging from a paltry $10,000 to $10 million are being bandied about as part of arguing the "economic impact" of the lockdown versus no-lockdown scenarios.
No social cost, no cultural cost, no environmental cost considered; just the economy, pure and adulterated.
For the record - as perhaps the only economist I know of with a social conscience, Shamubeel Eaqub, pointed out - the rule-of-thumb value economists actually put on the "average" life these days is $4.7m.
His extrapolation of the "human cost" of the pandemic, if we had let it run rampant, was $150 billion.
That's about 32,000 lives. The best-guess estimate of how many New Zealanders would die from Covid-19 if we'd done nothing to stop it.
Bear in mind that even if every person in the country caught the disease, that number of deaths would only be about a 0.7 per cent death-rate – compared with rates in places like Italy (10 per cent+) or Britain (5 per cent+) where they did too little too late to stop the spread. And that still doesn't encompass in all the other repercussions.
So, in case you haven't worked it out yet, anyone playing politics with the pandemic is full of it.
You really want to vote for one of them?
This "too soon", "not soon enough", "too little", "too much" vacillating from Simon Bridges and his supporters, being contrary for the sake of a perceived upside in votes, in no way shows they care.
What it does show is how worried the Right now is that Jacinda Ardern will lead Labour to a crushing electoral win.
But there's no room for any complacency around that, because the Right is going to get dirtier and more rabid by the day.
Paul Henry coming back to host a new current affairs show about how best to rebuild after lockdown tells us the race to spout the most fake election news has already started. Sure it could be worse; we could have Donald Trump blaming the World Health Organisation for his own failings and cutting their funding. He must have almost run out of US citizens to fool.
You won't let yourself get fooled, will you?
I hope not. Back to normal, for me, means caring, sharing, and appreciating our humanity – with not an economist in sight.
That's the true basis of any economy – people. Something a lot of the money-is-god crowd seem to have forgotten.
Which is odd, because the number of wealthy pushing for people to go back to work as soon as possible proves one thing: they don't make their money, you do.
• Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Views expressed are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.
