Dear Editor:
Protesters against lockdowns and mandates bring to mind an old episode from the Alfred Hitchcock Hour television series. Briefly, a man comes to the door and a lady answers. The stranger offers her $10 million but with one condition: if she takes the money one person, somewhere in the world, will die. She thinks about this, reasons that people die in volcanoes and earthquakes and other catastrophes every day and decides she will go ahead and take the offer.
When the man returns the next day, she says yes to the money and the donor hands over the cash. “Now you have your $10 million,” the stranger says, “But I have bad news for you. Your husband has died in a car accident.” The horrible realization then hits the woman that her own spouse has paid the price for her newfound riches.
This story is analogous to the situation where lockdown and mandate protesters insist that we must all set aside the masks, the vaccinations, the mandates and the lockdowns and just let nature take its course. If people get sick and die then so be it. The world must go on. We will finally gain herd immunity and begin to live our lives again, the way we used to. But at what price?
The stranger might say to them “we will stop all the requirements for this pandemic but only if you agree that someone somewhere will die.” The protestor might say “that is understandable – people die every day,” and they might insist that this is the best way to get back to normal. But in their hearts are the protestors saying, “But do not take my child. Do not take my parent. Do not take my grandmother.” Those who die must come from somewhere else.
But those who die do not come only from “somewhere else”. They come from our own communities and from within our own families. They fill our local hospitals. They are someone’s grandmother or a sister’s five-year-old son. That is why the safeguards against this virus are put in place.
The virus is the enemy, not the citizens and leaders around us who are forced to make terribly difficult and unpopular decisions every day. Our leaders and scientists communicate to us daily about how to best control, confront and discourage this COVID horror that we are living through.
I ask nothing of the protestors who have come to some of our cities to stand against mandates. But I pray that before they decide not to comply with what our society has put in place to fight this virus they ask themselves with total honesty whether they themselves are willing to pay the awful price that is demanded by the stranger at the door.
Jennifer Trott,
Braeside