The Sopranos is a show about how therapy is no viable substitute for effective policing.
Of all the frank observations and cynical punditry I’ve heard made during the escalation of the pandemic in Australia that might be the one that has resonated the most in recent days.
In times of despair humour leavens the gulf of uncertainty. There’s been no shortage of jokes, too.
Perhaps, for sheer sagacity, the salesman who seeks a buyer for a broken barometer – “no pressure” – seems to sum up the moment in which our society saw fit to defer all wisdom to its expert class.
The statues of Easter Island invite us to speculate awestruck on a deluge of reckoning supposedly beyond our comprehension.
What kind of hubristic folly decimates such great cultures? Look around. Reminders are in our midst.
It might go some way to explaining how truck drivers, in no abundant supply themselves, were the subject of recent controversy, not of their own making.
As part of knee-jerk interstate policy they were asked to have had a COVID-19 test within seven days before crossing a border carrying desperately needed essential goods by decision-makers whose data, unlike those companies running the trucks, is exempt from audit.
Moral superiority is no replacement for competence.
In a time of unconstitutional executive orders it’s comforting to know industry bodies like the Australian Logistics Council and Victorian Transport Association are equipped to fight these battles on behalf of industry and community in lieu of stagnating democratic processes.
New South Wales absorbs up to 15,000 commercial vehicles from the south each day carrying 650,000 tonnes of freight. For those of you playing along at home inured to caseload hysteria, those are the numbers that matter most right now.
Disasters produced by the changing of values to paraphrase Balzac have ramifications far reaching (I’m looking at you 5 May 1789).
The commercial road transport industry in Australia is world class.
Our supply chain processes have been tested and refined. This magazine exists to report on that constant undertaking of improvement, adjustment and discovery.
There may be no better nor efficient way of sabotaging an essential service then by making it suddenly accountable to those that are not.
What populations fear, according to Pascal Bruckner, is simply dispossession.
Things happen that are beyond our control and yet we are asked to embrace them. All the while knowing men whose charity to the common good often act in their own interests.
Therapies of disenchantment, approved by the administrative state, cannot suffice as solutions for the ills of our world nor will they appease the cumulative mistakes made in service of the best of intentions.
Let that be the formative change of understanding.
Like the old Chinese Cookie says, “the outcome you have waited for is assured. Continue to persevere”.