Being an accounting of the recent and continuing pandemic and its various circumstances, from the perspective of an inhabitant of the regions lately called the Lost Quarter. Dates unknown.

Day Two Hundred Ninety Four

This past week we discovered that the leaders who have put in the quarantine strictures in these parts have not felt it their duty to abide by them. Over the past months it has become evident how inadequate their handling of the gripper reborn’s invasion has been. After initially going on a war footing against the dread lord and instituting every measure possible, sparing no expense, they have, since the summer seemed to prefer diminishing the problem and hoping matters would sort themselves out.

The failure of that led to our latest lockdown and the cancelling of holiday festivities for families in the Quarter. But several of our politicians and their staff – 9 thus far – decided those strictures didn’t apply to them. They travelled from the Western Dominion to warm southern climes, as many people do during winters here. They went to places with no restrictions, while leaving us to ours, and offered no excuses for it. These were planned trips, they said, as if thousands of us didn’t have to cancel trips during this long misery. They were family traditions, as if the rest of us didn’t have family traditions that we had to suspend this year.

I was surprised at how angry I felt, how much of a betrayal it seemed. I have, it is safe to say, disagreed with the majority of legislation our current government has implemented since it was elected. The future they envision is not one I see myself in, whether that be in health care, education or industry. Still the feeling there was one of exasperation and annoyance more than anything else. A government I disagreed with was enacting its agenda as it was elected to do.

This was different though. These were not the actions of elected officials responsible to the voters of the Dominion. This was pure entitlement. How could the people who hold public office, with the responsibility to manage our response to the grippe reborn, decide they could do this? It seems they do not care about the people suffering and dying from the dread lord’s terrible powers, nor do they care about the rest of us who have been forced to lead shuttered lives these last months.

I think that is why, in the end, I feel so much anger. Their indifference to the growing spread of the grippe reborn, their lack of urgency in getting inoculations out to people, and their willingness to leave the country during a state of emergency they declared are all symptoms of the same disease. They see themselves not as our representatives in government, responsible to us, but as elites entitled to do as they please. None of us matter to them at all, and that is why they are willing to let so many of us die while carrying on with their lives as if the grippe reborn wasn’t there at all.