Full disclosure: I'm not a gang member

Full disclosure: you'll be surprised to learn, I'm not a gang member. Really. Not even an associate. And that's despite living in the Hutt. If I belonged to a gang, it would be a crap gang. We'd be called something like "Nerdz" and we'd rumble in the library forecourt with passive-aggressive peer reviews.

Whatever.

The thing is, you don't need to belong to a group to have some human sympathy for it, or if you can't manage that, maybe some common bloody sense.

There's around 20% of us who aren't yet started on their vax journey. Folks in the 80% - folks like me - worry about them. That 20% is our family, our neighbours, our mates. We love them, and we want them around at Christmas. The national conversation we have about this stuff is more than important: it's critical. So is the way we respect each and everybody's contribution, their leadership, in the face of this awful thing.

Herd immunity involves a herd. The clue is in the name. Herds can be imperfect things - hierarchies and pecking orders - but at the end of the day, they're still one. The welfare of each is connected to the next.

During this week, Sonny Fatupaito has copped a lot of flak. He's a gang leader from the Mongrel Mob Kingdom in the Waikato. He's been doing a bunch of stuff, including organising a hui with Māori and Pasifika health experts, about how we can, how we must, act to protect whānau from COVID.

Fatupaito made the news because he got an essential worker's pass to travel from the Waikato to Auckland, to mobilise the gang community to get busy against COVID. He seems to think he's got a better shot at influencing gang whānau than ladies like me blogging about shit on Facebook. It's almost as if middle class white people moralising ISN'T WORKING.

But Fatupaito, and especially his essential worker's pass, have provoked a backlash amongst some. These objectors are the people who listen to Mike Hosking and breathe angrily through their noses as they clutch the steering wheel of their Lexus in morning traffic. And the thing that they are fuming at is far from coherent, but it seems to be the "privilege" (bless) of Fatupaito having A DAY TRIP OUT OF HAMILTON.

I don't know Sonny Fatupaito, and we don't have much in common. He's done shit I don't care for. I'm not convinced we'd like each other much, if we ever met. But he's showing more leadership right now than your average Mike Hosking listener might summon in a lifetime.

And if he pulls this off, all of us will be safer: all of us.

I don't want to get philosophical on you right now, or show my privilege, but I believe it was High School Musical who said "We're all in this together".