New Zealand's covid response was one of the harshest in the world. What was it really like for ordinary Kiwis? Especially those who found themselves on the wrong side of the official narrative. The thirty stories in this book answer that question for a wide variety of everyday people. What they all have in common is that sooner or later they found themselves losing sympathy with the government’s covid strategy — one of the harshest in the world? What did it cost them as a result? These stories tell the truth, in all its rawness, of the personal cost of lockdowns, alert levels, mandates, government overreach, but also of the ‘sweet uses of adversity’. Here for the first time is the human face of the devastating politics of 'kindness'.