Separation

Aotearoa has lost our first child to COVID.

We do not know about this little one, except for the sparse demographics of the media: that he was a boy, aged under ten, and Māori.

We do know, although the news didn't tell us, that when a child dies his loved ones bend over his small body, weep until there is nothing left, offer to give anything they could to breathe back into him the warmth of their love.

There is no hierarchy of worth when it comes to life, to dignity, to human decency. We tried to tell ourselves there was - that this disease only affects the elderly and the sick, as though the elderly and sick are expendable, worth less than the convenience to queue for a burger without a face mask.

But there is a hierarchy of moral responsibility, of the obligation to protect. If a child isn't owed that protection from us, that duty of care, then we are not fit to call ourselves his community. We are not fit for much at all.

If you told yourself that vaccination is ineffectual, that the science is corrupt, or it doesn't matter anyway because your rights are paramount, then I am angry at you. If you formed your view not from the overwhelming medical consensus, but from cranks and truthiness and someone in your yoga class, then I am angry with you.

No, I am not angry: the thing I feel is rage. There was nothing - nothing - more foreseeable this. You made your decision: someone else pays the price.

I've seen pleas to consider the feelings of anti-vaxxers. They can't go to the pub right now, or to WOMAD, or their local café. They call it separatism, and they tell us that separation hurts.

Yeah, separation hurts. And no separation brings more agony than the death of a child. It's never chosen, and it doesn't end.