Age certainly doesn’t guarantee wisdom, but sometimes it lends perspective to your views.
The debate this week over varying degrees of ‘freedom’ began to take on a rather generational tone.
The Prime Minister, in his press conference, made a point of talking of the sacrifices young people had had to make over the pandemic to help protect the more vulnerable elderly.
Time to give them back their fun, was the burden of his message.
Mentioning this to a pal of similar vintage to myself, I suggested that at least we’d had the chance to travel, to do things, see places, achieve stuff, whereas the young folk had seen their entry into careers, study, globetrotting all delayed.
She had a different take. At my time of life, she said, I have a finite number of years left, and the pandemic has already stolen two of them.
In truth, you can see both points of view. It’s been really tough for young people who found their student life heavily curtailed, and on teenagers generally whose night life was reduced to watching telly with the old folks.
On the other hand, there are a lot of people who’ve worked long and hard with the expectation that they would finally have the time and the means to make a dent in their bucket list.
READ MORE: The latest government figures on deaths linked to Covid-19 in Argyll and Bute
The only safe conclusion to this is that Covid-19 has made losers of us all, most especially those whose underlying conditions forced them into virtual house arrest for months on end as they tried to shield themselves from the virus. In my book they’ve had the greatest burdens to bear, and the greatest loss of natural life and living to contend with.
They remain at the greatest risk of all from the people who refuse to take up the offer of vaccination, and who sometimes even refuse to wear masks, on the spurious grounds of personal freedom.
There’s a wheen of folks who would just love personal freedom but find it elusive, while people who may well be asymptomatic spreaders prefer loopy conspiracy theories to the huge weight of science urging us to take full advantage of whatever protective measures are available.
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