Thursday 9th April

We’re all well-and-truly sick of the ‘New Normal’ already.  As the memes and parodies start to diminish, there’s only so many creative dance Zoom videos and bedroom costume blogs one can really follow to keep our spirits up.  Hence why it became important to me to make an effort for Passover, an event that I usually just attend in a normal year, but this year I felt it was worth making a special effort.  I organised my friends to be together in Castlemaine, found all of the required foods and necessary pieces yesterday, except the essential Matzos, or unleavened bread, the ‘bread of affliction’ as it is called in the Seder book. So, I made my own, inspired by a fellow Jew living up this way who knows how tough it is to find the necessary accoutrements for Jewish rituals. (and Gluten Frei) 

Speaking of affliction, last night there was five of us having an illicit Passover gathering.  Even out here, on the edge of a small town in regional Victoria there was a suspicion that the neighbours might dob us in if there were too many cars in the driveway.  What a sad state of affairs!  We’ve become neighbourhood watch police for our own sense of ‘safety’ and civil obedience.  We get to decide if our neighbour's behaviours are appropriate or ‘harmful’ as some of the comments on a regional ABC facebook post argued when discussing how ‘Australian’ is the idea of dobbing in one’s neighbours.  We had to come up with ‘excuses’ if the police on the highway were to pull us over (highly unlikely), and for having a dinner together when we don’t all live here (religious ceremony – not a legal excuse).   
The news stories on police pulling over tradies on their way to work, or people on the beaches in Byron jumping up to do star jumps have done the trick, we’re all suitably afraid.  And the amount of minute dissection and commentary that has been fuelled by the social media phenomenon has just made this kind of social critique ten times worse.  The conversation has shifted dramatically around ‘flattening the curve’, probably the most repeated phrase of 2020.  Now it is about preparation and social cohesion, so we don’t end up like Spain or France, or GodBless the USA which has accepted, according to their fearless leader, that 200,000 deaths is an ‘acceptable’ loss, as if it’s some sort of military campaign.  This blows my mind, for some reason, that we can talk about ‘losses’ of people in numerical terms as if it’s a stock market fluctuation, or a football game.  ‘We’ will take that, because it could be worse.  I shudder at the thought that I could have easily grown up in America and have their problems to hide from, instead of the far meeker and more benign version of political incompetence that is our own national governance.  At least here we still have some skerrick of social welfare consciousness and the government is coming to the party, and just paying for it.  America has spent its modern history vaulting the capacity for individual enterprise, yet realises that Big Gubment may not be so bad after-all. 

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