Before the storm

New Zealand closed its borders to the world that day. But we had 0 cases. The tyranny of community transmission - which had already begun - still remained a hypothetical. So too felt the draconian responses being imposed overseas. Could we keep it out? Just maybe?

It's hard to comprehend that everything around you could just shut down - as I felt then - sitting in a nice public square, surrounded by well dressed people going about their day, drinking my long black, and settling into my first year at university. 

I took a video at the time of my surroundings because I felt a dissonance. An odd unreality settling in. Everything is normal and yet it is obviously not and probably won't be - very soon. (Don't worry, it's a very boring and shitly shot video)

I might as well have been in Seahaven, the fictional town from The Truman Show.

Me being in New Zealand, one of the last countries to encounter Covid-19 in the community, was perhaps the best place to experience a feeling like that during the pandemic.

Perhaps it was just because the principle that the world kept turning (if only you put away the internet and touched grass) had never rung so true in my ears. 

—

I was reminded of all of this given the events unfolding in the last several weeks. 

Petrified plankton remains the lifeblood of New Zealand and the global economy — the mightiest of all fuels: fossil fuels. An extremely silly war started by an extremely silly man now means that our access to this dinosaur era-adjacent juice is being withdrawn.

Nicola Willis says it's "a new world", stopping short of a brave new world.

Depending on how bad it'll be, the consequences could range from the *terrifyingly bloody and year-defining annoying for everyone* to *holy shit we're all going to die (not literally but basically in terms of everything else in our lives)*. 

Individualistically speaking, now is a great time to stockpile petrol or diesel. 

But it's hard to truly picture what it'll look like. Could we really see empty motorways at 8am? It's hard to picture - but then that's what we thought … only six years ago … and we can feel that. It hasn't escaped being part of our present, despite our earnest unconscious attempts to forget it all happened. 

--

We're still living in aftermath.

Humans are excellent at pretending they're not living in the aftermath of traumatic and life-defining things. If we weren't then we wouldn't have been able to handle everything thrown at our species on our evolutionary journey to where we are today. We're actually incredibly resilient at adapting to a "new normal".

That makes it all the harder to truly move on. At work, in school, in our magazines, in MMR vaccine hesitancy, in NZ First members' bills  - we still live in the aftermath of the pandemic. 

And that includes the explosion of tension from the amorphous, but clearly forlorn parts of New Zealand society that muddled along in the 2010s and were left behind in 2020 and 2021.

Social cohesion for a small but vocal minority remains fractured.  A deeply-reinforced inequity for the most marginalised. We're probably still before the storm right now, but it's hard to see those folks not falling further when and if the pumps run dry.

P.S. Now… of course, the most important talking point for me here is that Auckland will soon set records for how many trips are being taken with public transport. And it isn't because of the City Rail Link or anything AT has done. And less car, more train is a win; technically.