Relinquishing Freedom for the Warm Embrace of the State
by Katie Hopkins
The country I thought I knew is distorted beyond all recognition.
“Get your bloody heads up! Get your heads up! Hopkins, you have a face that could melt glass, but I still want to see it – get your head up now!”
The Academy Sergeant Major at Sandhurst drilled this into us pretty hard. As the military knows well, if heads drop bodies do too, so they demand you keep your head up so the men you are leading will look to you and know it will be OK, that you have your eyes on the horizon.
But right now who knows what OK looks like? Like many others, my first concern is for my elderly parents and what would happen if they caught this thing. It’s all very well me being bolshy for my own health, but my heart is glass in their hands, waiting to be dropped.
When we do get our heads up, the faithful horizon is a blur, our path ahead is a jumble of unknowns and all the signposts, once so clear, seem to have been taken down.
Even the biggest billboard, the Presidential Election November 2020, is a little wonky with talk of a postal vote. Countless dates in our diaries – speeches and rallies, events to mobilize voters and bring in undecideds – have all moved from confirmed to pending, as if our email router had gone down. Such dates were our handrail to steady us through life.
It’s not just politically that we are untethered, but personally too. School end-of-term dates are meaningless when the term will not even begin. There are no exams for my teens to force their concentration. My eldest’s birthday surprise was cancelled by the venue, and our booked vacation now feels strangely wrong in a time of eternal holiday. These things were a gravity of our own making that kept our feet on the floor.
But the thing that has really kicked the legs from out underneath me is the willingness of the majority to swallow “news” as if they were hungry for more fear to amplify the panic, and to use it to make others more anxious. Why do people insist on sharing the worst of it by WhatsApp like cats bringing in their bird kill?
The fear-merchants seem determined to avoid balance or perspective. When I try to tell my mother about annual flu deaths in a normal year, she responds with: “Yes, but did you see those mass graves in New York?”
I have been forced to quietly step out of the chat group shared by my closest friends, alarmed to see the same behaviors in the people I hold dear. First it was death rates and blind fear, and now it is the lockdown fun, and whose daffodils look brightest. From mass panic to minutiae in the space of three WhatsApp chats.
It is awkward. I can my feel jaw tighten at the faux frivolity of families showing how much fun they are having under lockdown, sharing their gym sessions in the garden, singing together in their lounge, clapping at the sky for our NHS, out-funning each other in florals, all posted endlessly online for approval. As if they are competing in some lockdown competition I wasn’t told about.
I sound like a curmudgeonly old git. Surely this is what we are supposed to do, to be all best-of-British about it and to keep calm and carry on? I do much of the same with my own family: the daily bike ride, the jigsaw puzzle in the lounge, planting seeds with my son that are now growing on my window ledge.
As a mum, I fit right in. But as a citizen, I do not. I have never felt so alone. Not because of self-isolation; it’s hard to find five minutes to yourself with a family of five. It is the grim realization of how willingly and completely the majority have been willing to hand over their freedoms in return for temporary safety. How quickly they have turned to the state for everything. And how many are desperate to act as enforcers without ever being asked. I find it heartbreaking to watch.
full story at https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/relinquishing-personal-responsibility-warm-embrace-katie-hopkins/