It's Time

Cafe Locked Out

First they came for the communists. Then they came for the trade unionists. Then they came for the Jews. And then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out. 

First they came for the nursing home workers, but I wasn’t one, so I said nothing.

Then they came for the registered nurses who, after heroically working through the initial days of the pandemic, where now been dismissed for Gross Misconduct for not taking the vaccination. And even though I felt this wasn’t fair and saw the posts of these nurses, calling for us to join them on the protest lines, because I wasn’t a nurse, I didn’t join them, or like or share their posts, and in my work’s staffroom, when a colleague asked me, quietly, what I thought about it, I just shrugged and said nothing.

Then they came for everyone else, but whilst I secretly watched all the protest videos, which left me full of tears, and whilst I could also see that the mainstream media was blatantly lying by under-reporting  the numbers of protesters and calling them names that were hateful and wrong, and despite also now hearing about all these people who were getting covid despite being fully vaccinated, and or having severe adverse reactions to the jab, I decided that to keep my house and stay out of trouble, I would take the jab, and since I didn’t have an adverse reaction and because I didn’t get sick, despite wanting too and I really did, I decided in the end, to play it safe, and say nothing.

For the same reasons, I took the second.

Then, a few nights later, my heart woke me up. It was beating like I had been sprinting, and it wouldn’t stop. So I called an ambulance and one of the first things the paramedics asked me was, “have you been vaccinated?” 

Yes, I said, Why?  But they just shook their head and said nothing.

Then, in the emergency ward of a hospital, with my heart still trying to run out of my chest, a nurse came over and told me that it was time to take my booster.

Are you kidding me? I’ve just taken the second shot and now I’m having a heart attack.

But instead of listening, they sent a doctor in who gave me a lecture to why I must be fully vaccinated, while condescendingly blaming my struggling heart on anxiety. Anxiety! Of course I have anxiety. Then stay off the internet, he said.

A few hours later they told me to go see a cardiologist and sent me home. But every cardiologist I called was booked up for months, then, with my heart still sick, and feeling like going to hospital was a waste of time, my boss sent me an email which informed me that, unless I took the booster, they would have to let me go.

What? You can’t do that. I’ve worked for you for over twenty years, and I’m injured. The vaccine has injured me. It’s not us, they said, We hate doing this, it’s the Government mandates.

I was so enraged I made a sign, Australia, Land of the free, just as long as you do as your told, and I stormed down to the steps of Parliament to join in the protests, but the steps were empty, and a homeless man told me that protesters don’t come here anymore. Determined to fight and be heard I joined all the protesting telegram groups I could find, but I found that no one had posted on them for a while. It seemed like every freedom fighter that I had been secretly following was gone.

Undeterred, I put out the call on facebook for others to help me restart the battle, to fight against their relentless coercion, the blatant injustice, for we are, and always will be a free country, where “my body my choice,” is gold. But then facebook took my post down and banned me for a week with a note that said, if I keep posting misinformation they will ban me for ninety days, or longer.

So with nobody left to listen to me roar, and with no lines of people to stand shoulder to shoulder with in this great fight, and with the mainstream media talking about other things, I’m here, in a pop up clinic. Before me, a young technician is preparing my booster, and with my broken heart feeling like it’s falling, I’m trying to focus on the face of a kind young person who is looking down at me from a poster on the wall, and next to their lovely smile their blurb states, in order to remain safe, I should book in now to get my fourth booster.

May 14th is a day for Nationwide protest.

I urge you to go.

Michael Gray Griffith