So much to say, so little to do

The movie, 'Groundhog Day' (1993), which allows the Bill Murray character a chance to redeem his erstwhile obnoxious existence by reminding him of the preciousness of seemingly simple 'everyday life' in small-town America, has become the definitive trope of our times to describe our collective sense of futility at the endless re-visitation of the current cycle of lockdowns and restrictions guiding our local response to the Covid-19 crisis. Australia has been lucky in that; our insularity, our cruelty, and our isolation (both geographic and pyscho-social) has allowed us to escape the worst wages of the pandemic as it evolves into eventual insignificance after carving through the earth with its metaphorical scythe over the past couple of years. But isn't the Myth of Sisyphus - the notional King, infamous for his trickery and his cheating of death, receiving his divine comeuppance via the punishment of having to push up a heavy boulder to the top of a hill only to see it roll down again and revisiting his task ad infinitum - the better analogy for our times?

Through this daily manifestation of what must seem to most of us like extremely cruel and unusual punishment, we have no choice but to delude ourselves into believing in the existence of the rainbow at the end of the tunnel - that we will come upon by the dint of our hard sacrifice or by a lucky happenstance or by the grace of 'God' - that will take the shape of our promised freedoms, our 'escape' from the death tolls that the rest of the world has suffered, our collective reward for our 'good' social-isolationist behaviour...

But has our existence now become a case of Sisyphus turning on himself and seeing his eternal task/punishment as a goal in itself; as a means by which to filter his inadequacy through the hellish spectre of self-induced privation as penance for his sins in the era 'Before-Lockdown'?

This scenario was only ever meant to be transient - a temporary gag on the spread of infection whilst other means could be found to ensure that we were spared the worst effects of the virus. But once we started down this road, can we now still remember where it was supposed to end? The people of Victoria vs. the people of New South Wales, the returnee vs. the resident, the essential worker vs. everyone else... Was this our fate all along - to be mired in the quicksand of self-pity, and loathing the motivations of everyone else, and being constantly preoccupied by our own dread and despair at the state of things... How do we now extricate ourselves from this situation - where we are turning on the apparent 'anti-science/anti-vaxxer/anti-lockdown' enemy and not realising that they are really the enemy within; bereft of the ability to isolate, without the parklands next door and the steady Work-From-Home income?

There will come a time of denouement - when we will have to examine the mass hysteria that led to this collective madness, this suspension of civil discourse, this turning on all the qualities we thought our small country was characteristic of during a once much simpler time... but was it ever really simple, or are the ghosts of our past sins driving our present abasement?