Once I was considered mad by my family for insisting on sanitising my hands and everything else in my immediate vicinity when out in public. Now the people who refuse to sanitise because of socialism or something tend to be the mad ones. Photo / Andrew Warner
Once I was considered mad by my family for insisting on sanitising my hands and everything else in my immediate vicinity when out in public. Now the people who refuse to sanitise because of socialism or something tend to be the mad ones. Photo / Andrew Warner
It was the second morning of the latest Auckland level 3. Breakfast's John Campbell looked gutted and no one looks more gutted than John Campbell when he's gutted. "God, this is a bummer, isn't it?" he told the Prime Minister. "Someone said to me they are going through the sevenstages of grief," she said, "but they've lingered a little longer on anger this time."
There are seven stages now? Elisabeth Kubler-Ross famously formulated five. A couple of extra have evolved over time. And now, as well as giving added heft to old favourites like depression and denial – lots of denial - Covid is busy generating new stages: impulsive pet-purchasing, gummy dinosaur-bingeing, developing the chiaroscuro techniques of an early Renaissance artist when applying makeup in a futile attempt to look less scary on Zoom …
A pandemic tips everything on its head. Once I was considered mad by my family for insisting on sanitising my hands and everything else in my immediate vicinity when out in public. Now the people who refuse to sanitise because of socialism or something tend to be the mad ones.
On Breakfast and on Three's The AM Show, the talk that morning was about human behaviour in plague time. There was anger over rule-breakers who triggered the lockdown. The two shows' approaches reflected reactions in the polarised world of social media: compassion (Breakfast) and carping (The AM Show).
Breakfast called for feedback on how people were coping with a rise in levels. The team were moved to tears by the stories. And by the support for Auckland from outside Auckland. "That's not customary," mused Campbell. This absence of yelling "It's not good enough!" at the camera wasn't a bad strategy for a problem that comes down to a failure of empathy and imagination. Hearing the cost people are paying economically and emotionally makes you think again about personal responsibility.
The messages being read on The AM Show were mostly from the other end of the spectrum: "I feel it's time for the PM to get a backbone and punish people." Duncan Garner played a clip of Jacinda Ardern talking about the downside of doing that. "Jacinda Ardern was pathetically weak," he fumed.
There were questions to be asked about things like confusion over self-isolation rules. The answers turned out to be complicated, triggering a range of reactions from John Campbell, from "Wow!" to "Boy oh boy!" Short of putting the whole nation under 24-hour surveillance, compliance is always to some extent about trust. The AM Show had an example of what trust is up against. Manukau Ward councillor Efeso Collins talked about flak he was getting from some in the community: he should repent and/or be excommunicated. Why? He supports the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out.
Life at the mercy of a random mutating virus offers bracing lessons on the human condition: things can change in a heartbeat. The ground beneath your feet is never solid. It can be easier to call for heads to roll than to leave behind the fleeting release of angry tweeting and work with reality.
There was talk of the "catch-22" Ardern is in. She's accused of being weak and indecisive. She's accused, sometimes by the same people, of being a tyrant set on removing our rights. She spent much of the morning trying to explain human nature in breakfast television sound bites.
"Am I angry? Yes, of course I am," she explained patiently – well, a little impatiently - to Garner. He'd played a clip of her outlining the dilemma she was in: "We are not going to get through this if every time someone does something dumb, we pillory them to the point that people are fearful to tell us the truth. The truth is gold for us."
Parents are familiar with this crime-and-punishment bind. If you tell the truth I won't be cross, I used to tell my children. I sometimes had to just about internally haemorrhage to keep that promise, depending on what the little monkeys had been up to. It's a longer game. You didn't get the easy catharsis that comes with blowing your stack. You did get a chance to build trust. Most of the time, you got the truth.
