Richard Pierce

Richard Pierce – author, poet, painter

Life, Politics

Freedom Day

Today’s the day. Today is the day.

You are now free, if you so choose, to put more pressure on the already over-burdened NHS, to add to the queues for already underfunded hospices, to delay even further cancer diagnoses and treatments already delayed by 16 months of pandemic, to cancel ever more routine operations which would improve people’s quality of life, to make sure many life-saving operations won’t ever take place, because by the time they can happen those they would have helped will already be dead.

Today, you can again, if you so choose, invade the personal space of others, cough into the non-existent room between you, and think nothing of it, queue to get into shops selling unsustainable single-use fashion, mingle with crowds without washing your hands, live carelessly and without concern, sign your own death warrant and that of thousands of others whom you will now never meet.

Today, on this great day of freedom, you are free to wander past empty supermarket shelves, free of produce because your country has decided to free itself of those foreign workers who were doing the hard labour you’re too proud to do, free to intimidate supermarket checkout workers because you’re not wearing a mask, free to behave just as irresponsibly as you always have, and to watch the life-limited, vulnerable, pregnant, and weak who still wear masks and laugh at them for not understanding that the virus has gone, declared by your incompetent government to have died out at midnight, to have ceased to exist, to have shuffled forever off this mortal coil, declared to have been all along a figment of everyone’s imagination.

Today, you are truly independent, truly free, with no border through the Irish Sea, with no foreigners to threaten the jobs you’ll never take. Today, you, the people, carry on taking the responsibility of saving this nation’s health, because the government has never accepted this responsibility, because it’s always denied that it should constrain the people’s right to catch and pass on a deadly disease whilst denying the people the right to protest, the right to earn a living wage, the right to live.

Oh, yes, today is Freedom Day.

Get notifications of new posts by email.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

Leave a Reply