The Great Silence

Cafe Locked Out

“I’m a paramedic,” he said. “Forty years. And do you know how many cases of myocarditis I saw in that time? Zero. Pericarditis? A few times, not many. But now—it’s everywhere.”

He’d refused to take the jab, so he’d lost his job.

“They still won’t let me back. In NSW, they’ve dropped the mandates. They even put out a media release stating that the Covid shots cause myocarditis and other things, but here? Here they still want you to be fully jabbed.”

His wife was in the health industry too, as were his grown children.

“All unjabbed,” he said, with a smile. “But they’re still working.

We paid a pharmacist—someone we never even met—to pretend they’d taken it. He organized their MyGov records so they could work. It cost a fortune, but it was worth it.”

I begged my brother not to take it. And I almost succeeded. But then his doctor told him it was safe, that he had to have it, so he did. His wife did too.

Then, after his second shot, he had a massive heart attack, and a few days later, he was gone. She ended up with severe blood clots, at the same time. They put her on huge doses of Warfarin, and she got through.”

He told me there were loads of paramedics like him who still couldn’t work.

“So even though they’re desperately short-staffed, they would rather let the public suffer—even die—than allow unvaccinated paramedics to work?” I asked.

That’s it,” he said. “And my daughter, she works in a fertility clinic. When the jabs were first rolled out, she couldn’t believe the number of missed abortions and stillbirths they were seeing. It was off the charts. But no one talked about it. No one.”

“Would she do an interview?” I asked.

“No, she can’t. She’d lose her job.”

“How about you?”

“No,” he said. “I can’t. I could endanger all their jobs. My son—he’s a nurse. He took two, to keep his job, but now he’s told them—no more. Sack me if you want, but I’m not taking them. And they haven’t sacked him. I think they’re so short-staffed now, they’re looking the other way.”

And the cancers my son’s seeing now,” he said. “Through the roof. And lots of them young people. They come in with Stage Four, and they’re gone within weeks . . . Weeks.”

I tried to get a job with a private ambulance company,” he said, changing course. “But during the induction, they wanted me to have a flu shot. I said no.

Sadly, though, there was one young man there—half-Indian, half-Australian—He was training to be a paramedic. He was only young. And then I heard that they’d found him. He died on his bedroom floor. Suddenly. He was only in his mid-twenties.

“Oh, I don’t know how you do it, Michael,” he said, patting my wrist.

“Before he died, was your brother aware that it could have been the jabs?” I asked.

“Oh, they were both aware. Their doctors had told them, secretly.”

“Were they angry?”

“Oh no. No, I think they just thought they were unlucky.”

“How about you? Were you angry for your brother?”

And he smiled and tilted his head, turning the question over in his mind. But in the end, all I received was a slight shrug and a smile.

“It’s so good to see you,” he said. “I went to all the big marches. I have a selfie I took with you somewhere on here,” he said, bringing up his phone.

And as he scrolled through the images of himself with those who had made names for themselves in that time—most of them silent now- I asked,

“Do you know why they ignored the marches? It was strategic. It was their way of informing us and everyone else, that what we thought and felt didn’t matter anymore. No matter how many of us were there. Look at Canberra—all those people, and not one politician came out to talk to us. And the media lied about our numbers. That was all on purpose. It was to make us feel powerless. To try and make us quit.”

“We went to France, you know,” he said, changing the subject. “And when we were there, we paid a doctor to fake giving us the booster. It cost us a fortune and I didn’t think we’d get away with it. But when we showed the paperwork to our doctor here, she said, ‘Oh, and there’s the batch number. Yes, this is fine.’ And so my wife could go back to work.

I could have too. But they wanted me to take the flu shot as well,” And again he shook his head.

“I was a good paramedic.” He said. “Specialized. I could give up to thirty-two drugs,” and then he cycled through all the procedures he’d been trained to do.

And we’d paid for all that training with our taxpayers’ money. And now, if you were at home waiting for an ambulance that just wasn’t coming—well, here was one of the reasons.

And that made him mad. At last, I could feel it in him.

“What was the young man’s name?” I asked. “The trainee paramedic.”

He told me. Then said, “I’ve got a picture of him here.”

And he lifted his phone and showed me the young man’s handsome, mixed-race face.

“He was a nice guy,” he said. And then, rhetorically added— “How do you keep going? Hmm. You amaze me.”

“I think like a paramedic,” I said. “Once I record an interview, they are inside me until I post them and share their pain, their fears, or their thoughts with the world—and then they’re out of me. Like I’ve dropped them off at a hospital.

That’s how you must have coped, right?”

And as he nodded, I watched his eyes, inwardly watching views from the past he didn’t share now.

“The only thing I haven’t captured is anger,” I said. “For all the carnage and the betrayal, no one seems angry.”

He nodded to this too, but with less vehemence.

Then he asked if he could take a picture with me, since he couldn’t find the one he’d taken all those years ago, at the marches.

And while I obliged, I was also pissed off. He’d spoken to me for an hour but refused to record his story in any way. So now all his ghosts were haunting me.

They haunted me for the rest of the day and the following unsettled night.

Until, parked up on a beach, with Kelli making us a coffee and the morning walkers and cyclists streaming past—like Covid had never happened—I opened up my laptop and delivered this collection of pain here.

But the question still remains, like a key-secret lost so deep in my soul I just can’t seem to reach it it—

Where is the anger? I don’t understand.

Or do I?

Could it be possible that under all our wealth, we are slaves, who believe that they have the right to do this to us. And it is our duty, once they’ve ignored our complaints, not to liberate ourselves or our children, from our masters—but rather to find ways to avoid their wrath?

To hide. Anywhere we can. Even if that’s only in the great silence supporting so many of our social smiles.

Michael Gray Griffith