 |
| Image courtesy Lion International |
When I served in a rifle platoon a very long time ago, one of the worst insults you could offer to a fellow soldier was to refer to him as "Jack".
The term came from the phrase "F**k you Jack, I'm all right".
Essentially, any soldier going "Jack" was either selfish, stupid, or both.
Stupid, because our lives depended on each other.
Selfish, because he was putting considerations about his own well-being ahead of that of his comrades.
A good example would have been a digger who coughed, sneezed, smoked, snored or farted in an all-night ambush. Such a soldier would have been given a swift kick up the backside by an NCO (or perhaps a fellow soldier, depending on who got to him first).
That principle of collective loyalty and cooperation is fundamental to success in any undertaking where disunity is death, and it is illustrated so clearly when we look at statistics emanating from the USA, where states with high vaccination rates are suffering far fewer Covid 19 deaths than those where vaccine hesitancy is rampant.
It is almost a perfect negative correlation.
And yet we observe people of little brain and miniscule moral comprehension taking to the street in the name of "freedom" in this country. In the process, they have casually desecrated the Shrine of Remembrance.
The "freedom" they're advocating is the freedom to jeopardise the well-being of the group in favour of the selfish demands of the individual. I've blogged previously about how that glib notion has fallen in a heap with the advent of the pandemic.
We have also observed the phenomenon (relatively new to Australia) of rent seeking politicians appropriating the anger and frustration inevitably generated by the restrictions to their own ends.
This is one cultural trend that should be swiftly booted back across the Pacific from whence it came.
It is divisive, destructive and dangerous.
Comments closed.
