Choice

Cafe Locked Out The Essays

It takes a lot to make most men cry. I didn’t know him; he knew us only from our shows, which he hadn’t been following for a while.

Taken near Eden

It was the gloaming—that time when the Lord’s greatest brush, the leaving sun, beautifies everything it touches: power poles, dumped and rusting cars, and this man’s face as he pretended to study the portraits covering our bus, but was really looking through and past them to the moments that had changed him forever, moments now escaping his eyes in fierce tears he kept wiping away.

“I didn’t want to take it,” he told the bus. But he had a new business, the business required him to enter council property, and to do that he had to comply.
He told me he’d had some reactions; tinnitus he’d never had before, now constant and often threatening to drive him mad.

I’d interviewed a mother who spoke about how mRNA-induced extreme tinnitus, had driven her daughter to suicide. Her daughter had been pro-science, pro-jab, pro-it-all, and had pushed her entire family to comply. Then her own deafening adverse reaction drove her from doctor to doctor, looking for a cure—or at the very least, acknowledgement.

They ignored her, telling her it was only anxiety, until finally the insane ringing in her ears, sent her voluntarily into a psych ward. There, after they ignored her symptoms too, she decided she had become a burden to everyone she knew, including her country, and so she voluntarily chose to leave us.

To make sure the tragedy of her end didn’t cause vaccine hesitancy, her story was all but wiped from history—until her shy, jabbed mother came on CLO and shared it.

The Interview evidence of Rachel’s fate

I met her mother two years later in a café in their town, one of the last living memory-keepers of her daughter’s fate. She didn’t want a follow-up interview. Sitting with jabbed friends, she—blasé—let us know she had released her grip on that secret’s burden. Now the only interview she’d ever given, ours, would become the final gravestone remaining to honour her daughter’s truth: a gravestone with no flowers that our government would love to scrub from the world.

Eden Carpark

“I’m going blind,” he said. “I can feel it. I wear glasses now, but it’s getting worse.”
He was in his early fifties, but that wasn’t what was squeezing these tears from his soul.
He still felt violated.
“Medically raped,” I suggested.
“Yes,” he replied, and finally he looked at me. “That’s it.”

It was too late for an interview, so I offered to record in the morning.
“It might be the only justice you’ll get,” I said, and he nodded.
But I sensed he wouldn’t return, so I let him empty his soul while God painted a sunset around us, using the pink clouds and jaunty waves as the base of another masterpiece—a staggering, momentary landscape in which, to any observer, our bus, this man, and I would be small details in the grander view.

Oh, why do we ask so much of God while daily ignoring the miracles He presents us, free of charge?
Do we really think God, or the universe, or whatever is behind all this majestic beauty, went to all this trouble just so this man could weep?

Further down the road another woman noticed our bus and wanted to meet us. Out of all the stories we have recorded, hers was unique. She, too, refused to be filmed, so we let her talk.
She told me she had profound regrets.
“In all honesty,” she said, “if I had my time again, I’d take it.”
“Why didn’t you take it?” I asked.
“I was coerced into not taking it,” she replied.

One of her sisters—a younger sister—had, in her words, bullied her to remain unvaccinated.
The cost: she’d lost her job of thirty-five years at the hospital where she’d been a nurse. Now she was a cleaner, fighting other cleaners for gigs. A businessman wanted someone to scrub his office toilets, and she was in the fight.

Her income had been slashed, and with the cost-of-living spiralling, life was an endless struggle.
She was fifty-nine. When I pressed, she confessed she missed the company of her nursing friends, the purpose of her work, the status of saying, “I’m a nurse.”

It was morning, freezing, and as she spoke I saw the cleaning gear shoved carelessly into her car.
I suggested she try landing some caring gigs, but her confession went deeper.
“I’m sick of caring for people,” she said.
She’d done it her whole life, and now here she was, in a lonely carpark, unable to share this truth with anyone but us.
I told her she should buy a van and hit the road.
“Who knows? You might end up cooking on a cattle ranch—whatever.” It made her smile but didn’t shift her mood.

For her, the economic destitution, the punishment for not complying, was almost complete; such is the hardship of this road.

Finally, at a ‘Stand in the Park’ in Bendigo—"Stand in the Park is like church to me, a place where our community gathers on a Sunday morning to heal our wounds”—a teacher told me he was working again, unvaccinated.
He claimed that at one point scores of pupils and teachers were at home, sick, yet some never got sick. These teachers, he said, had fake vaccine passports. They’d paid big money for them, and the only thing that threatened to blow their cover was that they never got sick.
So they faked illnesses to stay concealed.
They could never tell anyone—how could they risk it? Even a divorce might see an angry spouse reveal their deception. All through Covid, and still now, they were the modern-day equivalent of Anne Frank, except the cellar was in their souls.

I’m on the bus now. Mid-morning, cross-legged on our bed, I can see a puddle left by last night’s rain—now a disjointed, mud-framed mirror reflecting the sky and the gums reaching for it.
So much attention to this overlooked beauty; a beauty that—if it was created—was created out of love for beauty, as though beauty itself, in which we are immersed, is the overwhelming evidence of love.
For how could heaven itself transcend such elegance?

Perhaps all this beauty is a gift laid at the feet of our senses, an offering at the altar of us. Reminding us constantly, that in a culture determined to leave us feeling ashamed and redundant, we are as beautiful—if not more so—than this puddle, this mirror on the floor.

We are an audience for the impossible art of God, which includes each other: the current searchers hunting for meaning in the communal frame we call life.
Stop, just for a moment, and know you are meant to be here.
Why? That’s for you to discover. But I know the discovery is out there. Nature is thrifty; it doesn’t waste so much as a leaf, so why would it plant in you a hunger for meaning if that meaning wasn’t out here?

The same with God: why would He bother gifting you with that gnawing hunger if there were no way to satisfy it?

Perhaps it’s time to saddle the horse of fate and go searching for the Holy Grail, which this ageing man will now suggest is the bravest, noblest version of you.

Greatness is not a destiny; it’s a choice. Even having the courage to strive for greatness is greatness itself.

Currently, our society is under attack, and the meek can’t save us.
What we need is an army of greatness.

So choose well, for in the end, in your final days – the harshest judge of you, will be you.

Michael Gray Griffith

Written at Tracy’s Place.

Victoria 16/08/25

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It’s time to foster hope by having the courage to be seen

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