the brilliantly leaping gazelle

You’re all Dominic Cummings now! I’m not. I’m nothing like you.

One of the unfortunate truisms of modern life is that whilst everything you do you think reasonable, proportionate and speak volumes about what a decent person you are, other people, well other people are a whole different story. Frequently they behave in a way that you wouldn’t and therefore find annoying, sometimes they do things you wouldn’t do a million years and sometimes they do things that make you think ‘And these people are allowed to breed, because that’s what we desperately need more of, fucking idiots’

Actually, thinking about it, if they were trying to have a baby, I suppose they’d be fucking fucking idiots.

I though of this moments after opening a link my partner sent me, with the engaging titled headline,

Durdle Door: Three seriously hurt ‘jumping off cliff into sea’

 and a story that

Dorset Police responded to reports of concern for the safety of people who were jumping off the cliff at Durdle Door into the sea at about 15:45 BST.

Two helicopters landed on the beach and those injured were taken to hospital. The extent of their injuries is not yet known.

The beach and cliffs were evacuated. People have been advised to avoid the area.

Ch Insp Claire Phillips, of Dorset Police, said: “We have had to close the beach at Durdle Door to allow air ambulances to land.

And my first thought was ‘Why not just leave them screaming in pain? Let them deal with the consequences of their foolishness. Why go to all this trouble when we could simply treat them the same way we sometimes see crashed cars on the side of the road near an accident black-spot, to act as a warning to others? Sure they’d die, but is it really a loss? They’d be more use dead than alive anyway. Their rotting corpses would be a smelly deterrent to others, in much the same way that the heads of people beheaded were hung on spikes or the bodies of the hanged were put in giblets in olden times. Be more effective than a warning sign’

My second was ‘It’s not as if the hospitals haven’t got much on, is it?’

My third was ‘What are all the other people doing there?’ All of them probably though that whilst other people were flouting lockdown guidelines on travel and social distancing were behaving deeply irresponsibly, what they were doing was somehow exempt from the condemnation they bestowed on others. Because when others break lockdown, well that’s stupid, selfish and making a second wave all but inevitable. But when they do it, by the power of Castle Greyskull a curious transformation takes place which means there are suddenly compelling reasons that not only justify their actions but also make it seem the obvious thing to do.

The fourth thing I thought was after seeing this headline,

George Floyd death: Trump threatens to send in army to end unrest

was that people are no longer rioting for the poor man who died. Instead they’re rioting because they’re sick of lockdown, sick of a whole host of social problems that as a white heterosexual male in Britain I don’t have to deal with.

As I wrote yesterday, the government must be shitting themselves that a similar outbreak of lawlessness doesn’t happen here. But then again, it’s already started. If people can decide what they do is reasonable, that they can justify their actions to themselves, that they feel no guilt about doing what they’d condemn others for,then were already at the top of a slippery slope.

You all interpret the easing of the lockdown measures to suit your own needs. You cherry-pick the ones that allow you to do the things that you’d wanted to do anyway.

You’re all Dominic Cummings now! I’m not. I’m nothing like you.