When is enough, enough?
Stakes is high - Article published 2021
Published by: Demokratischer Widerstand Magazine, Berlin (translated to German from English. German version available here)
Written by Kerry Murray – 27th October 2021
When is enough, enough…?
Call it a deep unsettling, a sixth sense, intuition, divine knowledge or premonition. Some of us just ‘knew’, y’know? We didn’t know in the way you know how to fix something once you have practiced it or learned it by heart. No, we knew because somehow, someway, we felt it. We knew intuitively, in a way that Obi Wan Kenobi may have called ‘a disturbance in the Force’. Where it came from, who knows, maybe the ether, maybe God, maybe our subconscious. The question seems almost trivial at this point. In March 2020, we knew…we knew there had been a fundamental shift in our realities, and that normal was not returning soon.
I remember waking up every morning for about three weeks after the announcement of the first lockdown on the 23rd of March 2020. Waking up in the hazy state between reality and the dream, thinking all was well with the world and nothing had changed. Every morning I relived the stark realisation, coming to me like a cartoon anvil being dropped on an unsuspecting Wyle E Coyote, that no longer could I just jump in the car and head out to a restaurant or visit a friend, have coffee, enjoy a drink, see loved ones, or simply go about my business undisturbed. It was the realisation of no longer being free.
My first thought, once the initial shock subsided, was to try to learn as much as possible about what was happening, and this thing named COVID-19. I am now convinced that many of us were thinking along the same or similar lines at that time.
It wasn’t long after that I decided to document the protests and rallies, share the stories and truths of those involved and in some small way, give my contribution to the growing resistance movement.
Through the months that followed, we have seen and endured the needless, endless and remorseless systematic exchange of freedom for rules, of choice for thinly veiled coercion, and of sovereignty for ownership by the state.
By now, many of us have become somewhat desensitised to the sight of masks in everyday situations, thankful for those few of our number who we encounter, identified by a bare face and a head held high. Desensitised more still to those parents who choose to mask their seemingly ever younger children. We may even now find a perverse nostalgia at the sight of an elderly woman straightening and fixing the mask of her male companion on entry to a shop or supermarket, like a neckerchief or bowtie once made proper for an important occasion.
We still scoff at those who wear masks in their car alone or outside while taking in ‘fresh’ air, but largely we have to accept it simply to carry out our once ordinary and mundane errands without causing a scene or confronting someone. We tolerate it. It is but one of the many burdens we must bear if we are to retain the strength to continue the fight.
Once shocking sights have become new annoyances, irritations and things to be avoided. We have become ‘used’ to it. No matter how staunch your perspective, by now, we have all had to make exceptions to the rules of a civilised society.
Our new normal, the Tier system, which followed many disastrous months of dancing between lockdowns and a newly invented variant, was brought in on the 21st of June 2021, while the original U.K. Freedom Day as it became nicknamed, became our one beacon of hope in the dark; a metaphorical carrot dangled in front of the mesmerised populace. I’m not sure if we were really supposed to think that Freedom Day was ever going to materialise and of course, it never did. Like an overdue University paper, we received a 4-week extension on regaining our liberties. The ‘cases’ were just too high to allow it. The new, rescheduled, revitalised Freedom Day would commence on July 19th, 2021, with Prime Minster Boris Johnson saying that “we can go back to life as it was before COVID as far as possible”. However, sadly, but not unexpectedly, we didn’t go back to anything like normal. The day came and went without much fanfare. We were granted the removal of masks on a voluntary basis, but highly encouraged to continue their use by both the government and the astonishing volume of window signs, stickers and polite notices on display in almost every place of business. The obligation to stay 2 metres away from every other person was also peeled away, although that didn’t change anything really and most people continued to act as though you had the plague if you were to unintentionally pass too close in the supermarket aisle. As ever, it was a case of giving with one hand while taking away with the other, a pattern we have come to recognise from afar.
I can see how it might be easy now to think, as we go about each new Groundhog Day, the formula bearing similarity, familiarity even, but actually only an impotent facsimile of what once was considered living, that maybe it’s not been so bad; it’s almost over now; that we are nearly there, that life will pick up where it left off, the children grown by a couple of years, our bellies slightly rounder, our hair a little greyer. Hoping maybe that we will soon forget the trauma to which we have been subjected as if by some collective amnesia, and life, normal life, will resume. Encouraged that perhaps, this was all only a dream, a night terror that will vanish as quickly as it came. Surely, many of those we know have simply been ground down, their will to resist dissolved into submission under the inexorable, cruel yoke of a government hell bent on compliance or irrelevance. Will having to show proof of adherence to these rules to all who ask in order to work, shop, obtain medical care and eat out, finally wake them from their sleep? The new normal is simple - if you do not comply, you will not be part of society. And it doesn’t end with the new normal, this much we know. We have now entered a two-tier society, split between those who will comply and those who will not. It understandably seems at times too much for some to take and it will fall to us to open their eyes and build them back up.
As much as we continue to be vilified, ostracised and bullied, we must never think ourselves martyrs for this cause. We must never think of ourselves as the outnumbered, the outgunned, the marginalised, the ones cast aside. We are those who stand together for freedom and justice, those who seek out and explore research and find the censored voices to bring them to the surface. We listen to the science; we don’t make it up as we go along. It is a brave thing to make your voice heard, to give true meaning to the well-worn phrase ‘speaking truth to power’. This bravery is manifest in everything we do that rejects the so-called Great Reset when we live our lives in spite of it, not despite it. We are the rebels, the ones who dare to disobey. Our threat comes from our small actions, each chipping away at this wall of untruths, wordplay and misdirection piece by piece. Our personal rebellions, our refusal to comply or to tow the line is what threatens this agenda the most, the open defiance of the malevolent will of the state over its people. This ends when we say enough is enough!
We want to be free. Free from being told how to live our lives. From being told where we can go, what we can do, who we can see. Free from being told which medical interventions are now necessary to participate in the world, which new rules we need to follow and which new threat we ought all fear.
The time is now for the army of men, women and children who love freedom to rise up and usher in a new, new normal. A better normal, the one we know is possible. The one we crave and look forward to, the one we want for ourselves and for our children. The one we want we want them to build their dreams in.
Countless among us have had our dreams and aspirations upended or even destroyed over the last 2+ years. The holidays cancelled, the projects not completed, the jobs lost, the new ventures never begun. I often think about those still in the prime of their youth, heading off to university or perhaps a new exciting career. How can they now look toward the future with the same joie de vivre once so closely associated with those of the younger generations? We aren’t just trying to protect our own dreams now, we are also protecting the dreams of those who will go on to inherit this world. What kind of a society will we pass on and what is it worth to us to protect?
If not now, when? If not us, who?
We are the defenders of dreams…
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Another great piece Kerry. Went on my first London march in May 2021. I was so depressed with the world. My daughter said come on. We are not alone. I'd never been on a protest in my life.They said nearly a million was there that day. My faith in humanity was restored.