To wonder why people aren’t more angry?

[Rainbowb]

Throughout this whole crisis I have really been surprised by the level of acceptance from everyone in this country of the whole situation. I know we haven’t had much choice in the decisions made and we’re probably a very polite nation as a whole but we have been so quick to accept the arrival of a deadly virus and drastic changes to our lives, seemingly without complaint. Is no-one out there demanding to know how on earth this was all able to happen? We’ve faced the huge loss of human life worldwide and it is continuing, surely we are all entitled to get angry and demand answers? I see grieving families, children missing out on being with other children and not having an education, families being separated indefinitely, people’s mental health suffering and vulnerable people potentially at risk and I feel so frustrated and angry. If we got fired up about climate change, why not this??

This is exactly why nothing ever changes in the UK.

If you think frothing and anger will get you anywhere and change UK into some perfect Utopia, then go right ahead, it is a free country after all. Be my guest. If you think it's all the fault of those pesky voters giving the Conservatives their massive majority, then off you go and spend every last breathe telling them how wrong they were to use their democratic vote. Cloud cuckoo land.

Of course people are angry.

They just aren't as angry as the thick Americans who got together to protest. Give them time, in a couple of years we can protest with a bottle of soap in one hand and hand sanitizer in the other. Until then I'll make do with griping on t'interweb.

@daisychain01 You forgot to add "sheeple" and "free America" to your frothing

@Doryhunky couldn’t have put it better myself.

I have some anger at our government: I think the initial response was poor and since then
The inability to test people quickly and provide adequate PPE is a failing of them not to mention the scandal that is the Care Home situation. I think given we were not the first European country to get this, our numbers are very high and that is a failing.

@Littlemeadow123 We keep animals in appalling conditions. Just because the Chinese do worse doesn't mean we are exempt.

The difference is that there is very little we can do to change the situation in China.

I'm not angry, it is a useless emotion.

I'm not angry at the virus, it is a natural phenomenon and this pandemic was going to happen sooner or later.

I'm not angry at the government, they have been making difficult decisions based on the information given to them and they are dammed whatever they do some people will say it's wrong. Hindsight is a wonderful thing we can all say we would have done things differently. And we can't compare ourselves to other countries as this virus is so unpredictable.

I'm not angry with lockdown and lack of freedom, I can see it's necessary to save lives.

I'm not angry that we are going to have to finish lockdown at some point soon and send kids back to school. Again I can see it's necessary, the point of lockdown was to flatten the curve to help the NHS cope. I can also see the economy needs to be considered.

I'm not angry that we will get a second or third of fourth wave because we can't stay in lockdown forever.

I am frustrated and sad about all these things but not angry. I guess the only thing I get angry about is stupid people ignoring the lockdown rules because we would get through this whole thing quicker if everyone just got on board with it. Oh and I'm angry at the media who are so negative and trying to whip up anger at the government to make news. And I'm a little angry at all the teacher bashing I keep hearing. So maybe I am a bit angry......!

I am also proud that our nation isn't more angry. The American demonstrations are ridiculous, embarrassing and frankly dangerous. I'm very proud I'm not American.

Is no-one out there demanding to know how on earth this was all able to happen?

Im hoping there will be sanctions against China once we've come out the other side of this horror. How it happened can be addressed then.

Am I angry - being angry wouldn't be good for me, or those around me, so I don't get angry.

I have been a bit peed off these last few days though because of how different Ramadan is this year where I live but its like what my extended family say - this is the will of God and if this is how we are fasting this year then so be it. I really do feel for them though. And of course there will no Eid in the traditional sense for them/us either. We've already been told - stay at home during Eid.

I was also taken aback yesterday when I was told I couldn't enter the supermarket because Im over 60.

The authorities where I live have managed extremely well to keep our numbers low and for that I'm very thankful.

Should we be more like the American idiots demanding the country sues China, protesting against their ‘freedom’ being taken away and dealing with a president who tells them to inject clorox?

They have a third of all worldwide cases so the anger thing isn’t really working out well for them. I’d rather just stay at home watching Netflix personally.

Basically we’ve been lied to. This was never about flattening the peak until the NHS could cope. It was patently obvious that the NHS could never cope with this. It was a combination of a knee jerk reaction to the people demanding a lockdown to be seen to do something and panic and had no clear exit strategy. Now people are starting to realise that they’ll have to come up with more spurious social coercion. Yes, I know right to life trumps other human rights, but there are other illnesses needing to be treated and other problems not being dealt with. The government must lift lockdown and we can’t have social distancing as only 15% of Londoners could get to work and no crops will be harvested or imported either so people will die of starvation or in food riots instead.

Anger isn't really a pragmatic response at the moment. There will be a time and a place to demand accountability for failings but it's not right now is the middle of the storm. All it would achieve is the relief from venting but at the cost of creating a noisy and unnecessary distraction and risks destabilising the current calm social order. I think we are all agreed, things are shit enough as it is.

We have an opportunity here to learn and grow from this as a species. Its shit though.

I love how everyone just assumes China is responsible when we've had our own dodgy scientists at work on this sort of stuff since at least WW2.

For most of human existence we've been subject to plagues and pandemics. This is a drop in the ocean, and while it's tragic for those losing loved ones, it doesn't compare to the Spanish flu, the 1840s cholera outbreaks, polio,and all the rest. We've forgotten how easy it is to die of a disease.

I'm angry at the government I suppose, for their lack of preparation, but at the same time they just thought the same as everyone else. That it wouldn't happen. Within a generation or two, we stopped fearing illness in the same way, because if we get ill, we know we're likely to survive. A quick read of most 19th century literature, taking especial note of any reference to illness/death, and you start to see how attitudes have changed.

Viruses mutate and jump all the time. There doesn't need to be any big conspiracy around it. In terms of human history, t's business as usual. We can't yet control nature to the extent that we thought we could.

Well, I did a history degree, specialising in genocide but with a few good old plagues included. Sometimes human beings die en masse,

Couple that with four years of being trained to expect the minimum in critical abilities by the British public and to expect fully naked self-interest from the government, this is all sort of expected.

Thirdly, to echo previous posters, anger is not a constructive emotion.

Luckily, I'm part Kiwi, and after finally being able to go there after years of planning, my husband sees the light too.

Anger. Its a wasted emotion in this situation.

It’ll just stop you noticing good things and get you tired and wound up.

True, it did originate from China. Probably from their wet markets.

But we’ve all a bit to play in this. Our ‘need’ for cheaper and cheaper food hasn’t helped matters even if we didn’t eat bat, pangolin etc etc.

But it’s happened, lets get on with solving the current problems and then see what can be done to prevent a reoccurrence.

I am beyond angry at the government that could have protected the UK from the influx of this virus which we all knew about back in January. I am angry that planes continued to fly into this country from all over the world with zero health checks on anybody coming into the UK (and by that I don't mean "foreigners", I also mean British people returning home because I was one of them and was shocked to see that not even Heathrow staff were wearing masks ). I am angry that the Liverpool / Madrid football match wasn't cancelled when it was obvious that an influx of Spanish football fans - when Madrid as already a virus hotspot - was going to lead to thousands of deaths. There was even a thread about it on here before it happened so it's not as though you had to be a scientist to figure this out. I am furious that the government failed to provide PPE for Health Workers and that so many of them have died as a result when this could have been prevented. I am furious that an incompetent government totally failed to prepare for a pandemic that we knew was coming. New Zealand's example shows how with timely, decisive action, a virus can be kept at bay. Like New Zealand, the UK is an island nation and we could have done the same. Unfortunately, unlike New Zealand, our government is a bunch of incompetent idiots with only their own interests at heart. So, yeah, I'm angry.

Plagues and pandemics like other natural disasters seem to be the way of the world. They’ve been occurring periodically for thousands of years and they can’t be predicted or controlled. Railing against them is like getting angry about tornados or volcano eruptions or the common cold.

I wish I wasn’t living through a pandemic but I’m grateful that I’m doing it at a time and in a country where most people have access to clean water, adequate food and health care if we need it.

Anger, I guess, is a natural human emotion when we can't change things. If we can alter our environment then we tend to get a kind of mass energy rather than anger.

But we do like being able to 'blame' someone or something to give us something to turn our anger towards. If it was an asteroid plumetting towards earth to cause the death of a huge number of people upon impact, we'd probably manage to be angry about that. And blame someone for not having put the resources into the ability to shoot it out of the sky.

I know some are facing the possibility of losing everything they've worked for. They are getting angry because the anger gives them the drive to keep on going.

Not sure who they are angry AT, mind you. Life, I suppose.

As someone not born and raised in the UK, it surprises me everyday how much shit people here accept from their government. It's as if the government's failings, cruelty and not caring are like the weather. Something that just happens, not choices that those in power make. We all know that this government, like several others around the world, chose not to prepare despite warnings about pandemics in general and this coronovirus in particular. To me the refusal to make the government accountable for the results of its actions (aptly demonstrated on this thread) reflects that people in the UK feel that whatever you do, things won't be better anyway, so why bother. Ground down into acceptance of whatever situation you find yourself in to the point of churlish rejection of the idea that things could actually be better.

How would getting angry help?

There is always a time and a place for questions and answers.
It’s easy to sit in judgement in an armchair.

@Jakadaal I'm so very sorry.

It's a Pandemic. We're mere humans. We need to hunker down and do the best we can together. Now is not the time to protest and break down our imperfect structures that would pose an even greater threat to us right now.

We cannot say we should have done it like this country or that country because the virus is so unpredictable. We don't know what strain we have or what would have happened if we made different decisions at different times. Some countries have made the same decisions and had different outcomes, some countries seem to have made what most would consider the wrong decisions and they've had better outcomes/far fewer cases maybe they were just lucky.

I'm not saying our government made the right decisions but they did the best they could based on the scientists information. Things may have been a lot worse if they made different decisions we'll never know.

This is not a simple equation. It frustrates me that people are so busy saying I told you so, we should have done it like ......... (insert country of choice). But when things go wrong then everyone loves having someone to blame.