When you have no choice you're a coward

I can understand pragmatism. I don't always believe in it. There are times in life when the best thing to do is not to keep your head down and what you have to do to survive.

Shocking, I know. Our culture, here in our WEIRD countries, doesn't prize any higher values. Even our religions (what's left of them) have dissolved into cults of emotional comfort. Used to be that a man could live by a warrior code. Used to be that people could really believe in divine powers outside of this world.

Those people could live for higher purposes. The idea of life lived for the mere continuation of life would have been as alien to them as their ideals are to us.

But I can understand a pragmatic attitude. I even have sympathy for it.

What I don't respect is cowardice. Throughout this panic over flu season, we've seen a complete failure of leadership.

Across the board. Large and small. Public and private.

Here in Godzone, we've got the commissars in the Lugenpresse explaining that we have "freedom" back.

We've got no such thing. Those willing to comply with the illegal, immoral, and unethical diktat of the health bureaucrats have been issued temporary licenses to be somewhat less oppressed.

Do not confuse their lies with freedom.

We've got business "leaders" who, when not panicking like a frightened school-girl, are mostly going along with the scheme without a word of protest. Forget dissent, these bovines will not even speak out against the Gesundheitspass.

Pragmatism, I get that. You've been starved of 100 days of income and counting. You just want to open up and get on with trading. You'll do whatever they want, as long as all this stops.

Problem is, friend, it doesn't stop when you do what they say.

And I can't respect cowardice.

It doesn't matter that "most Kiwis" support the vaxport. The opinions of the majority are as valuable as an icemaker in McMurdo when public opinion is so easily shaped by mass propaganda purveyed by a compliant (if not outright owned) mass media organ.

Upwards of 30% of the population will be suckered by whatever panic the media and government whip up. A staggering 40% will sense something is wrong. But they'll keep their heads down, noses clean, and play along because "it's what you gotta do".

That's almost three-quarters of your society that's going to go along with whatever "they" decide. Nearly one-third of them will cheer as they're loaded into the box cars.

Forget the polls. Democracy has revealed its ugly, uncut, dysfunctional nature  as the tyranny of the idiot majority.

What's needed now is leadership.

Sadly Kiwis aren't big on that either. They're a live-and-let-live sort. And there's the ever-present specter of the Tall Poppy syndrome ready to scythe down anyone who gets too big for his britches.

Here's what I'd like to see.

I'd like to see at least one of these so very desperate businesses, who has caved into the vaxport out of lack of alternative, come out and admit that they are doing it under coercion.

To take a stand and admit that it is wrong, and that the tinpot tyrants who rolled this out need to be hauled before a tribunal.

I still wouldn't agree, but I wouldn't think badly of them.

Why are you worried about the polls? If these cows are so easily led around, then get to leading.

There's a self-reinforcing cycle here. Nobody speaks up, so everybody thinks there's total agreement. Since everyone thinks the majority agrees, nobody speaks up.

All it takes to break the circuit is for a handful to stand up and ask why the emperor's riding around buck-nekkid.

Any Kiwi businesses have the stones to stand up? Anybody?