In yesterday’s post, I shared how the premiere of Victoria, Australia put five million people under house arrest. Drones hover over parks. Police enter homes without warrant and remove people to quarantine facilities. Surely, to justify destroying the economy, traumatizing children and 1200 suicides (since March) kangaroos must be dropping dead in the streets from COVID.

Alas, no. According to the WHO, as of August 25, Australia has had a total of 517 deaths (many of which I doubt were actually caused by COVID-19… but let’s assume it’s all legit).

517 deaths, however sad, does not seem like enough loss to justify such measures. Especially, when we look at the median age of those dying in Victoria: “The majority of deaths have been reported in males aged between 70 to 89 years,” reports their Department of Health. Here’s a graph they provide:

Does that graph look like a deathly plague is sweeping Down Under? No. It’s elderly people dying. No deaths under 40. No female deaths under 50. Hardly any under 60.

As Mark Twain said of Australia’s history: “It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.”

The premiere of Victoria appears be lost in incongruities, contradictions and incredible claims about the danger of this coronavirus; while full of “beautiful lies” to justify his actions. For how could this possibly be about flattening a curve or running out of ventilators? If anything, it seems a trial run (during the southern hemisphere’s winter season) to see what governments can get away with when the “second wave” sweeps the northern hemisphere in late autumn.

For those of us enjoying the northern summertime, remember Æsop’s The Ants & the Grasshopper: Act now to stop this unfolding medical police state. Like Gandhi, write letters to people of influence, but with the speed of a word processor. Hand out flyers like they were life jackets on a sinking Titanic. Or get really creative and figure out what’s the one unique thing you can do to stop this nutty new normal and make it your sworn duty. For as is attributed to Bertolt Brecht, that rebellious German poet: “Where right becomes wrong, resistance becomes a duty.”