Civil Commotion

Unless one has a legitimate medical reason to not get vaccinated – I’d make zero exceptions for “religious beliefs” – getting vaccinated needs to be mandatory. All employers, universities, restaurants and other business need to require their employees (the ones who refuse should be fired and be treated as have been fired for cause, thus depriving them unemployment payments) and customer be vaccinated and refuse entry to the unvaccinated. Life needs to become very difficult and unpleasant for these individuals who are putting themselves and all of the rest of us at risk. They need to become pariahs and no sympathy afforded to their ignorant, self-centered, and/or delusional beliefs.

Michael Hamar

I unreservedly agree. Whether or not to vaccinate is not a private decision; it affects the people around you. It’s not merely a matter of personal care and well-being — it’s a matter of good citizenship.

Offered an opportunity to flee the death sentence for “corrupting the youth,” Socrates chose to stay imprisoned and accept his fate. His reasoning amounted to this: He had a civic duty to live under the law, to obey a lawfully-rendered decision.

This is, so far as I know, the earliest published discussion of the idea of civic duty, the idea that one owes something to the larger, wider community in which one lives.

I am thinking of civic duties a lot these days because of the vaccine resisters, that one-third of the country that refuses to accept a Covid vaccination; there are just enough of them to assure that Covid-19 continues to spread and remain dangerous.

There are probably some small number of people with medical conditions that might be exacerbated by the vaccine, but that number is surely very small. For the overwhelming majority of us, the vaccine poses no danger whatever and offers the benefit of defending against a potentially fatal respiratory illness.

What’s not to like? Why refuse to do something clearly beneficial, when the failure to do it poses a personal danger and threatens my neighbors?

Honestly, it looks to me like no more than an eruption of juvenile cussedness, and I totally, unambiguously, 100% support those companies and public facilities that are demanding proof of vaccination as an entry ticket.

Every unvaccinated adult that I know is a Trump suppoerter. That can’t possibly be a coincidence; undoubtedly, the generality of vaccine deniers reject vaccination as some sort of sign of loyalty to Donald Trump, science skepticism, hostility to the notion of public responsibilities in general.

It probably sounds hard-hearted but, generally, I’m just fine with natural selection carrying-off the morons; unhappily, these clowns are a danger to everybody around them because they are breeding grounds for variants — one of which, inevitably, will be able to slip past vaccines. The person who refuses vaccination is not — Repeat: NOT — endangering only him– or herself; those people endanger everybody.

Going unvaccinated is not quite the same as carrying a loaded, unholstered gun, but it is every bit as reckless, irresponsible, and anti-social, and I suspect we’re approaching a point where sensible self-protection is going to require that the unvaccinated be put out of our lives, told they are not welcome in our homes. I hate to even think of doing that, but the present trajectory of the disease makes it appear increasingly likely.

Republished from 2020-Jul-20

On this date in 1969, at just about this time, I was in the backseat of my grandparents’ car, parked next to a cornfield near Gladwin, Michigan.

We were listening, like most of the world, to the first manned landing on the moon — still, the greatest stunt of all time and an achievement which should cause every American a thrill of pride.

Could anybody have imagined then that evangelical loonies would become the most influential force in American politics? That they would be enthralled by the most corrupt president in American history and that they would elect — and may re-elect — a president who adores a Russian dictator and is hostile to even rudimentary science, climatology and epidemiology?

The pious have succeeded in making it unseemly to doubt their claims — and I wonder why that is? We can question astrology, we can question Dr. Fauci, we can criticize the President — but we must never ridicule some pious buffoon who claims to be in regular contact with an Invisible Friend and who vouches for the accuracy of an old book that claims everything went bad when a talking snake tricked a gullible woman into stealing a piece of fruit?

This is nuts. The Pious are the most ignorant people in society, they are affirmatively hostile to the Enlightenment ideals that America is founded upon, and they are insanely loyal to a corrupt executive whose incompetence kills people every day.

And they occupy some exalted space beyond criticism? It’s unseemly to doubt that they are the very best people?

Well … bullshit. I want to see churches failing, their buildings abandoned and in disrepair, their pastors standing in the unemployment line. I want it to be allright again to be smart in America, and I want to see astronauts on the moon again.

I was very young then, but I can distinctly recall the polio scare of the 1950s. “He got polio,” somebody would whisper, and suddenly the play-area and –mates of we neighborhood children would be sharply circumscribed and enforced. When a polio vaccine was developed and widely available — in my neighborhood in Detroit it was administered one Saturday at the local elementary school — everybody went and stood in line and got their shot, classmates to rarely seen elderly neighbors.

It was a matter of personal protection, but not just personal protection; it was explained to we schoolchildren as a matter of good citizenship, too.

Overnight, polio practically disappeared; in 2017 there were only 22-cases reported … worldwide.

Presently, North Carolina requires proof of the following vaccinations before children are permitted to enroll in public schools:

• Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping Cough
• Polio
• Measles
• Mumps
• Rubella
• Hepatitis
• Chicken Pox

When is the last time you heard of any child catching any of those sicknesses? It’s been quite a while, I’ll bet.

So, puh-leeze, spare me the empty-headed rhetoric about the state not having any business demanding that vaccine be put in your body; the public has every right on earth to impose reasonable conditions upon the use of public facilities. A Covid vaccine should be added to the list upon verification that it is safe for children.