Plague and Christmas stand underneath the mistletoe for a second year.

This year the Holidays are decked in the colours of Omicron. Plague and Christmas stand underneath the mistletoe for the second year. I am beginning to feel like the character Ives in the movie The Great Escape who is overwhelmed by his captivity in a German POW camp and attempts to jump a fence which results in him being shot dead by his Nazi captors. I just want this to be all over but know like someone in wartime Britain in 1942, the road ahead has many more miles.

Last Christmas wasn’t as hard on my emotions as this one which approaches with the lugubriousness of a play by Strindberg because then our politicians and political pundits promised us, they saw light at the end of the tunnel. Covid Vaccines were going to return us to normal and the nightmare of a global pandemic not seen since 1918 would soon be just a memory.

However, the light politicians saw at the end of 2020 was just a reflection of their and our wishful thinking. We wanted to believe that Covid was like the storyline arc in a limited tv-series. Everything was going to finish on an optimistic note where science saved us with the minimum of personal hardship. But life had other plans for us and the world. First of all, there was the vaccine-hesitant in developed nations who choose either from fear, distrust of government or simple ignorance not to take the covid vaccine ensuring that the virus remained in our communities. Second, wealthy nations and their pharmaceutical corporations who developed the covid vaccines didn’t share this protection in any adequate measure with developing nations. This guaranteed covid variants would emerge and come back to our shores with the vengeance of a spurned lover at a former partner’s wedding. Omicron was sown and reaped because of the narcissism of the western world and not South Africa.

Let us be honest with ourselves in the best of times too many of us did not care what happened in faraway countries. But during Covid, our indifference to struggling nations compared to society's collective urge to return to consuming ephemeral goods and services was pathological.

Throughout 2021 our governments did not keep us vigilant and safe by telling us with conviction rather than like reading from a shopping list that we must adhere to social distancing, avoid travel, wear a mask and wash our hands frequently. Our governments did not spend the money to ensure that our schools and public buildings had proper ventilation and air filtration system to minimise Covid’s spread to unvaccinated children and young people. We did not use our common sense that told us this was not over. Instead, we congregated in large groups, ate in restaurants and travelled abroad. Sure not all of us did that. But too many did, and we did not complain when our friends or family became lax in their Covid protocols because it seemed impolite or supercilious to mention it to them. We hoped that politicians who, for the most part, are from the 1% and top-line journalists who are also from the 1% had our best interests at heart rather than their compatriots, the multi-millionaires and billionaires in business who need us to shop until we drop.

Yesterday, the CDC reported that 800k people have died from Covid in the USA. Most of them did not have to die, and most of them would not have died if their politicians, their business class and their news media valued the lives, the hopes and the dreams of ordinary people over the profits of the 1%. But, I would be smug to say this is not the case in Canada or Britain because both countries have shown the same disregard for the lives of their citizens. You see capitalism, like Covid knows no borders and is as pernicious in its disruption of human happiness.

We are not going to get out of Covid without many more bruises. We have failed as both individuals and societies because we see ourselves now as consumers and not citizens. We are in for worse days. Until ordinary citizens take ownership of their destiny and demand better of themselves, their news media and their elected representatives, we can not tackle Covid or the greatest threat to our existence, The Climate Emergency. If we keep trusting big business to save us rather than science and empathy, December 2022 promises to be worse than 2021. So draw a line in the sand and say, "My life is worth more than the bottom line of a billionaire's spreadsheet."