Dissent; the Key to Balance.

There will be pitchforks levelled at me before this ends, merely for trying to make sense of things that make no sense at all. But... Perhaps it's time we all stopped hurling stones at people for not thinking, feeling and doing what we want them to and instead just listened with our ears and maybe our hearts. And perhaps it's time some of us were not afraid to speak up. Every week there are more protests in our country and in response to them I've seen abuse and vitriol that has made my skin crawl. You see, I am an over thinker, an empath and someone who wants to know 'the why' of peoples thoughts more than the thought itself. And when I watch the footage from the people on the ground at those protests (because I honestly couldn't care for the medias flavour on them), I see people who are desperate. People whose own lives are in tatters, who just want to be heard and who have no means by which to make that voice count (in a country where parliaments are closed, media is running a horror show, governments are busy running their errands and social media censors all dissent). I see the odd turkey and occasional crackpot amongst them, but for the most part it's normal people, of all ages, who are calmly and sensibly showing up. I don't see people who hate others or who are intentionally trying to endanger anyone. I see people who are days, weeks, months and pushing into years beyond their breaking point. People who began this journey doing as they were asked, helping and obeying. People who at some point reached the stage where they just couldn't any more. People who understand history and the context of it in todays world, who want us all to acknowledge, that, which many of us are not prepared to say out loud. I have found it ghastly to watch people who have barely been touched by this entire situation, beyond minor inconvenience, spit words at those people with no regard for just how much they have had to suffer or how genuine their concerns really are. We have single mothers feeding their children 'water' because there is no work, therefore no food. We have families who have lost businesses that were three generations in the making. Now with four generations to support and no income between them, they have literally nothing left. We have people dying because they weren't able to access health care interventions because of state borders or because their appointments were re-scheduled, costing them precious time. We have thousands of vulnerable children who have fallen so far behind in their education they will never catch up (which directly effects their potential life expectancy). Thousands of children who have not returned to school, and more locked out now who will not return. Children who are in actual danger; not from a virus that will spare them, but from their own homes and their own despair. Isolation has always been a weapon of torture and here we now exist in a country using it more heavy handedly against it's own people than any other. As such, we face an evermore cataclysmic mental health crisis but we are discouraged from even acknowledging what the levels of isolation, stress, anxiety, despair and depression are doing to ourselves and the ones we love. Maybe our defensive mindset towards protest would change if we started calling them a 'mental health outreach program'? As some protestors have said those moments are what stops them from ending their own lives. The human interaction, community, the outside, the purpose, the experience of all of the things governments have taken from those people without asking, drives them on. If they can still feel they have something left to fight for in those moments then perhaps we can be humble enough to say that is a better thing than having no reason left to go on. The reality is we don't even know how many people have given in and ended their lives because they had no fight left in them. We won't know for some time. Unfortunately our systems can tell us the exact numbers of a virus, every hour on the hour, but we do not get data to quantify the other debts collected in order to secure those dividends. Whilst we pour over recent modelling we still see no data to add context to the wider effects of what we have done to our country. We have hundreds of issues that should be being addressed but instead, we the people, allow our media, our government and the select few c0r0na cultists among us to lock these issues out of our conversations. We the people are the ones responsible for 'the great pretend' that only one type of illness and one type of death matters, because we refuse to speak up and say "that is enough". Many of those who I have sought out about their involvement in protests admit they protest because they simply want us to acknowledge the wider inter-generational human cost of what we are continuing to tolerate and accept. Several of them were even 'fully protected' but respectfully believe it's time to talk about more than one illness and one response method. To be honest I am one of those people who is fed up, my line was crossed some time ago. In a society that touts 'kindness' as the magical antidote to everything, there is less and less of it every day. I see peoples tribalism and colloquialist team choosing causing us to descend into a heartless, selfish bunch of morons. State against state. Governments against communities. Experts against experts. Family against family. The unscathed against the suffering. With friendships that dissolve like ice when the slightest differing thoughts are aired; because tolerance died of a virus. We have forgotten that even if we don't like others opinions, they are all entitled to them too, and perhaps in order to strike balance in our approach to this madmen's errand, their dissent should be welcome and encouraged and their concerns should be heard; because we have to be realistic and wholly honest when we talk about cost. The pendulum has swung and we may just need them to swing it back to a middle we can all live with. The other option is that we continue to allow the elite, the media and collective governments to continue to falsify a societal juxtaposition where we willingly forgo our compassion and living our lives in exchange for the groupthink of the tribe. Instead to do the right thing we must demand the address of all the concerns, contexts and contributions that have been left in the cold. Fundamentally, change may only come when we demand the recognition that the living of lives, livelihoods, deaths and illnesses of all of us matter. A change in rhetoric, approach and intention may hedge on the non-compliance of those brave enough to speak and act out loud. And at this point, the resurgence of compassion may be as simple as acknowledging that people are not acting out of selfishness. Compassion may simply be allowing ourselves to see how much hurting there is in others and not throwing little pebbles at people who are already down. For what are we if we are not always compassionate? What have we become if we can not acknowledge and hear people acting out of absolute primal desperation? What are we if we do not allow a place for context, freedom of opinion and for individuality in a society that has forgotten who it is?