Twats

I don’t like to swear in the title of a blog, but the fact is we have people panic-buying in case of a coronavirus shut-in, and I’m having to resist the urge to slap them all to death.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m loving the fact that we are their purchasing venue of choice, and my sales figures will once again be boosted considerably by the unending stupidity and unnecessary overreactions of Joe Public, but my need to see human beings acting like responsible, sensible, intelligent animals is over-riding my capitalistic training. Any time someone says “Do you have tinned fruit? Like – a lot of it” I want to drag them into my office and hit them over the head with a copy of Michael Crichton’s “The Fear Index” (if you’ve read it, you’ll understand why).

The worrying thing is that this is just the start of it. It’s not the ‘outbreak’ that’s the issue, it’s the way it’s being overhyped and abused; the way a collective cloud of uninformed fear is making millions easy to manipulate. Everyone’s diving into blind panic without actually analysing the facts, and that’s great for companies like us who are making money out of it, and for the powerful few who like to control the population, so this pattern will be continuing long after this current scare has passed.

My suspicion is that, in about a year, you’ll be having a chat with a family member or close friend and suddenly go “Oh, yeah, coronavirus. What were we all worried about, really?” but then you won’t learn any lessons. The media, reporting without responsibility and obsessed with a daily click count on their website stories, will have moved on to some other ‘pandemic’, ‘crisis’ or ‘meltdown’ and will be misquoting experts so they get a good headline, and 98% of your everyday Britons will be buying into it and running around headlessly like the nuclear fallout alarm has been triggered.

Of course, I could be completely wrong, and Covid-19 may well be the Armageddon Bug that wipes all humanity from the Earth, but that’s fine, because if I am wrong, there’ll be no-one left alive to point out my error.

RC 5-3-20