Did we put too much weight on our beauty? Did we really think that the armoured cars were morally incapable of running over pieces of cardboard we’d written the words freedom and love written upon?
Do we still believe that if we could only get then to read one document, where every amendment and clause supports our arguments, that they would lay down their pepper spray canisters and, with their eyes opening to the actual view, they’d join us, maybe even ask for forgiveness?
If nothing else, then how about the fact we’re not dead? We didn’t die and we’re not getting sick. Surely, they can see that? Why doesn’t that resonate?
For they are?
Surely that will make them see.
We’re trying to help them—like hands stretched down to the drowning.
Why won’t they grasp our hands?
Why are they protecting that which is drowning them?
The world turns, unaware of species becoming extinct as others release their grip on liberty and slip into totalitarianism, by simply choosing to believe what they are told rather than seeing what is there.
And then there is us.
Our trench never owned any weapons, just courage, just defiance, just grief and shock as we watched them shove over and pepper spray our grandmothers.
The only army we’ve raised was a Free Hug Army, and I watched as they melted into the arms of soldiers. Often our soldiers were grandmothers offering solace to the very police who brutalised them.
Still nothing.
And most of our ideas and campaigns have failed or have stalled, their engines lacking the fuel of enthusiasm, as opponents’ defences—walls built from apathy—continue to hold. Some of them still yell down "Cookers" and "Anti-Vaxxers" from the battlements, where most of them are sick, and all of them appear to be ignoring their own dead and dying.
It appears pointless, hopeless, and then someone sends you another petition to sign. As before us, petitions roll over the mud of no-man’s-land, their lists of signatures melting in puddles.
But what if all this was planned? What if all this is just as much a con as Covid was?
Do we really think that they hadn’t planned for resistance?
Or that they aren’t learning on their feet too?
The violence of the shooting at the shrine was the catalyst for Epic.
That moment in time where we all came together and, apart from injuring us and a few incidents, we were largely ignored.
Many Australians have probably never heard of the unprecedented event.
And they ignore us everywhere, even now as they allow us back into the family groups we were kicked out of. The price of re-entry is that we don’t talk about these things.
Now too, our groups are shrinking, as our soldiers—with nothing but frustration, deep stubborn pains, and a sense, sometimes, that tears can be just a blink away—have melted back into the greater herd, shepherded there by poverty and the calls to move on.
Now we stay silent in staffrooms, swiping through messages from our own people and gently smiling at our memes—we are so good at memes—while the others whisper to each other about how someone else they know now has turbo cancer, before hiding their concern under the condescending grin they keep for us.
Us who are not dying.
All through history, those who would oppress others have used two mighty weapons. The first is Fear.
But after almost five years, Fear is losing its teeth. Even their own soldiers don’t react to it anymore. The masks stay in the box; the boosters are degrading on the pharmacists’ shelves.
But their other weapon is Disillusionment.
And one of the side effects of this insidious weapon is frustration. And frustration is one of the causes of infighting, which in turn causes division, dousing the campfires of dissent with a realisation that, in the face of great and cold change, we are powerless.
Whereas they, committed to their vision, keep inching ahead, determined to drag us all to a future that is not suitable for our human souls.
So here we are now, quietly studying the evolution of Trump and Kennedy, hoping, secretly, that eventually their apparent revolution will reach our shores and liberate us.
If you feel disillusionment now, then their weapon is working, or in other words,
Welcome to the New War.
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