WHEN I was a psychologist I frequently came into contact with people to whom something dreadful had happened. It was often not their fault, and they had done nothing wrong. And yet the awfulness of their inescapable circumstances had wrecked their lives.
Talking therapy helped – a bit – but there wasn’t any behaviour modification programme I could implement which might have made things better for them. I knew that as soon as they left the department and went back to their lives, they would be engulfed again by the toxic miasma which was eating away at their happiness.
My patent remedy was to try to foster a sense of humour and make them laugh, encourage them to join an evening class, and perhaps get a dog. But my boss regarded my recommendations as facetious at best, and grossly improper at worst. Ultimately, the only thing to do for my hapless clients was to listen patiently, be nice, accompany them part of the way on their journey towards healing, and be compassionate. I hoped and still hope that somehow they all managed to get over it and move on. I just about did.
But sometimes it is best not to ‘get over it’ and ‘move on.’ Sometimes life throws bad things at us for us. I know that sounds facile, like something out of a self-help psychology book: ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’; ‘Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No’; ‘Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway’. But what happens to us really does happen to us, and we would be fools casually to brush everything aside and move on. Sometimes you are the completely innocent party who has stumbled into something quite inadvertently and it has been a ghastly, unnerving experience that has destroyed your self-confidence and ruined your life.
In such a case, it is important that you do not forget what happened, who or what was behind it, and what you were subjected to. Even if it wasn’t anybody’s fault, and ‘just one of those things’, it has taught you something invaluable. Blame yourself or ignore it at your peril.
In this regard, it is important that we do not forget what the Government subjected us all to during the covid event. Under the pretence of a guarantee of safety, which was utterly bogus in the light of what we now know about the range of long-term damage suffered by thousands of people, the Government removed our liberties; encouraged us to snitch on our neighbours; ordered churches to be closed for the first time since ‘Good’ King John; made us queue outside Tesco like tramps waiting to get into a soup kitchen; orchestrated pavement displays of worship to the golden calf that is the NHS, instructing us to bang cooking pots above our heads like some primitive tribe trying to bring on the rains; shoved cotton buds up our noses till our eyes watered; damned us as diseased and infectious, treating us all like Typhoid Marys; insisted on our wrapping our faces with old jockstraps, incontinence pads and panty liners; prohibited us from being with our nearest and dearest; censured the unvaccinated for killing people by spreading covid to the only-after-two-weeks ‘vaccinated’ – all the while brazenly and shamelessly flouting the ‘rules’ themselves, gleefully rubbing our noses in it, with a callousness and contempt that make Ian Brady look like Mr Pastry.
To quote from the Wile E Coyote Forum: ‘Covid-19 was the test of social responsibility. A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world. There were numerous examples globally of maintaining social distancing, wearing masks, mass vaccinations and acceptance of contact-tracing applications for public health, which demonstrated the core of individual social responsibility.’
The mindset of the automaton capable of writing that piece of gruesome drivel is a million miles beyond the ken of any normal person. We may well ask why in God’s name did our government do it. But we must equally ask why in God’s name did the vast majority of the population go along with it.
What possessed celebrities such as Andrew Neil, Esther Rantzen and Piers Morgan to propose that vaccination should be compulsory? And that those who demurred should be banned from the NHS? Had these individuals taken leave of their senses? Had they been kidnapped and put through some clandestine Ipcress File type of brainwashing, turning them into replicants who looked and sounded exactly like their old selves, but who could not possibly have been their old selves? At this very moment, Esther is pushing for the legalisation of ‘assisted dying’ (aka killing), although I note that she isn’t quite dead herself yet. Maybe her particular type of cancer is going to lose its long battle with Esther. I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a feisty lass and a tough, no-nonsense cookie. She was enormously popular on Braden’s Week and That’s Life! I met her once face to face. She hadn’t had her hair done and her roots were growing out, making her look like one of the serving ladies in the canteen; she was a bit snippy with me, but I was too star-struck to mind. How can someone who once proudly declared of That’s Life!: ‘It made people think, and it gave them quite important information about ways of protecting themselves from danger, conmen, all sorts’ – now urge us, without batting an eyeshadowed eyelid, to inject ourselves with an indeterminate gloop? Dame Esther may or may not be moving on sooner rather than later, but the British public should not be moving on, not sooner nor later.
The Covid fandango was a litmus test. If it showed us anything, it showed people in their true colours. Who would want anything to do with psychology (the science of behaviour) now? Or television, especially Dear Old Auntie — the Brainwash Beaming Coven. The pernicious purpose to which these two erstwhile noble, altruistic and benevolent enterprises have been put has corrupted them beyond redemption. They should be abolished.
But then everyone responsible has moved on. Easy for them, I suppose.
