Opinion: Underlying health conditions? That’s almost all of us
At the daily press conferences in NSW, deaths are parenthesised by age and “underlying health conditions”. We are being indoctrinated into believing that these deaths are happening not to healthy young people – the economically productive, important, “valuable” members of society – but rather to the old, the weak, the infirm.Credit:The dead wood, in other words, for whom it would be crazy to jeopardise the success of the economy, or even interrupt people’s pleasure-seeking.
The Scandinavians, living by forest metaphors, categorise these people as “dry tinder”, that fragile underbrush accumulated on the forest floor and ready to combust, waiting only on the inevitable spark. The narrative is compelling in its implied imagery and quasi-Darwinistic simplicity: a powerful battalion marches forward, its muscular forearms and resolute jaws redolent of the factory worker on a 1950s Soviet poster.
Producing, living, loving – these are the people charged with fulfilling the social and biological destiny of mankind. Of course, they can carry the infirm and the old to an extent – they are not heartless, after all – but only to an extent. As soon as the burden starts to impinge too much on the progress of the Great March Forward, it is time to shed sentimentality and with it those unproductive elements that hold “us” back.
She has had frequent hospital admissions with diabetic ketoacidosis and suffers a number of diabetic complications. Rest assured, however, that if she should catch COVID and die she would be compartmentalised at the daily press conference as “a 20-year-old woman with underlying health conditions”. The fact is that
and more than one in five of us are over sixty, so it is a nifty trick to get us to believe that these people are all somehow “other”. They are not, theyIt is a further cynical fiction that soon the rest of “us” will be able to circulate like vaccinated super-beings, impervious to the virus as it scythes down the weak, the infirm, the old. The examples of Israel and other highly vaccinated countries, which are reimposing restrictions hand over fist, show this to be blatantly untrue.
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