Hope in the time of Coronavirus has been in short supply. Lockdown loonies combined with the incessant, daily pandemic curve-watching mixed up with our precondition of job loss terror has unleashed a perfect storm for our fragile souls. And this mega storm has created a national wellbeing crisis. One that needs a different kind of leadership – a leadership of hope.
You see, when we’re all feeling a little depressed we need small, incremental green shoots, particularly as we’re heading towards the second half of lockdown loonies. Cos with the benefit of hindsight it seems that around four weeks is our limit before lockdownitis truly sets in. The walls start closing in, the routine starts to feel a little, well, routine-like and we start reliving weird apocalyptic zombie movies in our nightly dreams that are just starting to feel a little too, like, possible. Enough I hear you shout! Time to snap out of it! Time to start thinking differently, to pick ourselves up, to shake off those lockdown blues. Time to stop staring at endless news conferences in the hope that, well, there might just be the vaguest amount of hope. Time to think about a new tomorrow, a better tomorrow and most important of all time to get back to McDonald’s.
You see, we can put up with the endless negative news cycles and the stay at home teens firing up testosterone like it was a chain saw in our left ear. We can handle Donnie and Bozzer banging on and off – mostly off. One being Mr time off and the other just off the rocker. We can take the military style operation of a weekly shop or drive to pick up gas or goddamned exercise in dodging everyone else to perform the perfect social distancing dance in a napkin sized so called community park with not a lot of the community bit left given the gestapo gangs of do gooders taking pics of us getting one inch too close to other earthly beings while dodging rabied dogs snarling at our proverbial heels. We can even take the new roadblock vigilantes straight out of the cast of Hot Fuzz that keep us from going too far to take a walk or jog or simply to go have sex in a forest. Doesn’t everyone do that? And talking about Hot Fuzz, have you met our local villagers? But while we can take all of this, we cannot, cannot, cannot take another friggin second without our Big Mac and fries.
Where’s the leadership of hope from Mickey D? They just keep telling us not yet. Not yet. What the f*** is not yet! Endlessly bombarding us with this horrifically over used Corona statement ‘not yet’ doesn’t solve a goddamned thing. Just cos every politician uses it doesn’t make it right. And they only us ‘not yet’ cos it’s French for I don’t know what the fuck’s going on in my government cos it’s such a friggin crap shoot of chaos right now that ‘not yet’ is as good a statement as your gonna get from me and in any case who thought getting elected meant we had to make decisions in the first place. And btw ‘not yet’ is only as overused as every goddamned Coronavirus statement from EVERY single venue or hotel or attraction or National Trust joint starting with ‘It is with a heavy heart that we have to close for now…’ What the f***, did they all just cut and paste the same friggin statement. They pay the bosses of these joints like cash went out of fashion (which it will soon but that’s another matter) and the closest they can get to writing a goddamned customer statement on the front of their website is a cut and f*** you paste.
But, getting back to the immediate Mickey D issue, how friggin long does it take to do socially distanced drive through or take out or just goddamned click and collect. You see I’m willing to let any politician we can still remember the name of, given Donnie and Bozzer hog EVERY airwave like a Corona virus on a pollution particle, take every last shred of rights from me but I’m not prepared to go another day without my McDonald’s. I mean there has to be some kind of limit right? There has to be a line – and that line could even extend to a friggin queue across London just to be able to exercise my inalienable right to chew on shit from Mickey D.
And that, in the end, is why we need a new kind of leadership. A leadership of hope. The thing that has gotten clearer and clearer from this pandemic is that the old fashioned Putin style, populist, white male, autocratic leader type that thrives off fear and flag and slightly strange free press semantics where the truth is as popular as the Coronavirus, is dead. And when I say dead I don’t just mean Kim Jon Ding-dong, I mean ALL of these old style leaders in government, in corporates and in life. And I guess to wrap this all up in a McWrapper what I’m really trying to say is that we should invest our time not just in finding a virus for this little Corona fella but also on a major Jacinda cloning programme so we can get Arderns running every government and corporate and mostly running McDonald’s. You see, if Jacinda was running things right now, I’d be sitting down at my local Mickey D swigging a chocolate shake soaking up a good old fashioned burger and fries while listening to Jacinda on McTV telling me that everything was going to be just fine. And I wouldn’t need to believe a goddamned word she said cos it wouldn’t matter two hoots of a Corona infected bat so long as I could hang out at my kinda heaven – Mickey D heaven.
McNewNorm really can be as simple as that.
If you enjoy these posts on ‘Surviving’ all I ask is for you to support a vital Climate Change project, called DSP, by giving just £3 or just over $3 per month. To find out more CLICK THIS LINK.
Philip Letts 