In case you’ve forgotten “Long Covid” was one of the last gasps of the Jab-Everybody-Crowd in late 2021, the argument being that even if you didn’t get sick, let alone die from C-19, there would be ongoing debilitating effects – so it was still worth it getting the jab and the boosters. It was just more unprovable bullshit, often aimed at kids, but as a British study showed early on, kids who’d never even had COVID had a higher prevalence of “long COVID” symptoms than those who had actually been infected at the four-week and 12-week intervals of the study. Although that study hardly saw MSM daylight this propaganda push never really grabbed hold of the public anyway, exhausted as they were by almost three years of hysteria and social controls.

But an interesting article from Plain Site here in New Zealand, Downtown is for Zombies, points to what the author calls “societal long-covid” and what it appears to be doing to us:

Our ‘societal long covid’ has amplified the loss of any communal, let-alone societal, hopes, values, and meanings. For what was meant to be a time of ‘coming together for the common good’ was in fact, for many, the experience of increased stress, distrust, and division and the recognition that for most, there was no such thing as ‘a common good’. Rather there was, and are unequal outcomes and benefits and so what we actually have in common is a sense of lack and loss, not a ‘good’. 
…
What we lost was any sense of ‘being a people’ and being a people in spaces that are ‘for people’. 

He links this to the increasing “zombification” of our downtown areas (he has a nice little riff on the classic horror movie, Dawn of the Dead, where the people finally realise that “They’re us“), most notably in the CBD’s of Auckland’s and Wellington, where he acknowledges that there were already issues before the great Chinese Lung Rot pandemic with a steady rise in homelessness, child poverty, and dirty parts of the city that nobody wanted to go into, steadily strangling the little retail business that were there.

And then we shut everything and everyone down.

The resulting loss of “communal, let-alone societal, hopes, values, and meanings” has thus bled into the things that are supposed to pull us back from this mess, our institutions. Unfortunately they’re the same things that got us into the mess and he sees the results:

[I]in its destruction of livelihoods and communities, in the turnaway from in-place, in-person social connection, in the reinforcing of increasing educational and economic inequities, in the increased lack of faith in government and institutional solutions and actions, in the seemingly unstoppable rise of anxiety and the attendant collapses of hope and meaning, in the intensification of a long-simmering rage and despair…

I don’t know anything about the author, Mike Grimshaw, but suspect he’s a bit of a Lefty, with all his talk of “educational and economic inequities”, “being a people”, consumerism as death, and this rather naive take:

Today, we have hopefully learned that we can’t allow some cities to succeed and others to fail, we can’t allow cities to succeed and our towns and regions to fail. For zombies are everywhere – and ‘they’re us’.

The story of history is the story of cities that rise and those that fall permanently and even our own little nation shows that, as a drive through Blackball and other towns on the South Island’s West Coast will reveal. Only a few, like Rome, manage to rise and fall and rise again (likely with more such cycles in the future).

And what that history also teaches us is that sometimes there are changes that simply cannot be pulled back from the brink, as some people are dimly beginning to realise about Jacinda Ardern’s “Captain’s Call” in 2018 to shut down our oil and gas industry. Those who’d worked in the industry, like former ACT MP, David Garrett, commenting over on Kiwiblog, bluntly stated back then that this could not reversed because no such company would risk the investment of billions of dollars when it would simply be trashed the next time Labour-Greens took power.

The new government doesn’t believe this and is pushing ahead to dump the oil and gas ban, which naturally has Lefties and Greenies like The Screaming Beard in full planet-is-burning/melting/boiling mode. But he need not worry, as even talk-show hosts now realise the terrible truth:

Since October, the world knew things were going to change in New Zealand. But from what I can tell, no one is interested in coming here to do the work. And frankly, if no one has registered an interest in 9 months, I think we might need to start getting realistic about this. It’s probably over, the ship has sailed.

You can sort of tell by the language that Shane Jones is using that he might know this too – he’s talking about trying to make it more appealing for investors to come back by giving them really long-term contracts. It’s almost desperate stuff, and I suspect it’s because he can see no one’s nibbling after nine months. And why would they?

Actually the fact that Shane Jones of NZ First is in charge of this is a tell. Luxon and company either believe in Net Zero as the means to combat Climate Change or are too frightened to argue against both ideas. Either way they’re happy to let Shane take the slings and arrows because it keeps NZ Firsters inside the tent and fools National-ACT-NZ First voters who don’t know the business – while also knowing that the business realities of the industry which insiders pointed out six years ago mean the plan’s ultimate failure, which can then be met with a shrug of “Hey, we tried!” and blaming Labour-Greens.

There are plenty more National MP’s where this guy comes from.

Another Socialist ratchet win! A big, fundamental decision made by Labour that National couldn’t reverse because it’s-too-hard-impossible-embedded-bigger-fish-to-fry-politically-risky-extremist/fringe-not-centrist-might-lose-power-don’t-you-know.

Possibly all correct as well, at least politically, but no answer when the power goes off in households across this nation. Maybe then we’ll fulfill some of Mr Grimshaw’s hopes and get all “being a people” communal-societal collective again – possibly with burning torches and pitchforks and perhaps even tar and feathers.

Although we might struggle to get the tar.