Why did the cops arrest the painting?

Because it was framed

It is Christmas, after all, and it is the time of year to open those Christmas crackers and delight in telling really, really awful jokes.

The possible crappy gifts in our Christmas crackers this year are lockdowns or vaxxports.

But, Hallelujah, the dread spiky spikeness of Doom, Omicron, seems to be a bit of a semi - merely a promise of something to come. It is looking like it needs the virus equivalent of viagra.

Great stuff, we say. If Omicron is so mild, we shouldn’t be thinking of lockdown.

That’s very true.

But be careful of the framing here

Please, be very careful. In rejoicing at how the meek Omicron is inheriting the Earth, don’t be subtly steered into a trap.

The trap here is to say

“Omicron is much milder, therefore we don’t need to lockdown”.

What you are being steered into here is a position which could be taken to mean

“it’s only because Omicron is mild that we don’t lockdown. If Omicron were as dangerous as Delta we would need to lockdown”

We never needed to lockdown for SARS-CoV-2 full stop. Not for the original WuFlu, nor the VindaFlu, nor any of their extended family of mutated terrors.

We can live with covid - what we can’t live with is the threat of lockdown as a tool to combat every Tom, Dick and Hanta that comes our way. We cannot allow lockdown to become the “tool of choice” - the hammer used for every viral nail.

We might think the lockdown ship sailed away long ago, and it’s more important now to resist the unholy lust to get our kids all Goo’ed up. The latter part here is, indeed, very important. But it’s also important that we kill the idea of lockdown stone dead - deader than the eyes of a triple-jabbed masker.

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