I should start out this piece with a brief disclaimer before my centrist and leftist friends sandblast me for heresy: I am vaccinated.
I have never been, nor am I now, “anti-vax”. I have been adamantly against the anti-vax movement for the better part of a decade. I’ve gotten into tons of arguments with mommy bloggers and people who thought vaccinating their kids would give them autism and I still maintain that their concerns are unfounded and paranoid. I believe that vaccines are an unqualified good and that in a properly functioning society nobody would question tuberculosis and polio immunizations that protect them from debilitating diseases our ancestors suffered and died from.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a properly functioning society.
As I speak, the nation of Australia is opening internment camps and arresting citizens without trial. President Biden has repeatedly attempted to enforce anti-constitutional federal vaccine mandates on the public via OSHA regulations that would force vast swaths of the public, especially poor minority populations, to lose their jobs for refusing the vaccine. The US military is currently in the process of discharging its members who refuse the vaccine. The White House put out a statement all but wishing for “a winter of severe illness and death” for the unvaccinated.
Even my girlfriend in law enforcement, who is unvaccinated for various personal reasons, is being threatened with losing her job by the state of California, meaning that her city could lose the only person it has who watches tracking devices that keep pedophiles from stalking elementary schools. Instead of letting her perform her job at home on her laptop as she did during the March 2020 lockdowns, the state would prioritize firing its protectors.
All the while, leftists on Twitter are BRAGGING about how exciting it is to watch their enemy’s children held down and vaccinated against their parent’s will. The party of body autonomy and freedom of choice now fetishizes state power to force inject children for the greater good.
I am pro-vaccine but I am anti-vaccine mandate. Which by the definitions of some modern governments makes me anti-vax. That’s an absurd contention given that I’ve otherwise been 100% pro-vaccine for my entire life but far be it from me to disparage the whims of totalitarian governments and power-drunk bureaucrats. I am not anti-vaccine but I am anti-government oppression and against the arbitrary and cruel enforcement of power against free citizens.
I believe that the vaccine is probably some sort of medical miracle given how quickly it was turned around but I also live in the south and spend time with a plethora of people who don’t share that belief. I’m comfortable with that because I’m vaxxed. I’m not in danger. Neither alpha, delta nor omicron variants are statistically dangerous to the vaccinated. I’m also 27 years old, healthy, and physically active (if about 25 pounds overweight). I have no reason to be afraid.
I could lick half of the doorknobs in Nashville and not be afraid of COVID-19.
I’m not going to take orders from supposed authorities who are too scared to name the newest mutant strain the “Xi Variant” (Xi being the next letter in the Greek alphabet) out of fear of offending the communist dictator of China.
The root of vaccine hesitancy is distrust: distrust in institutional power, distrust in “the science” (TM), distrust in authority, and distrust in the current administration.
Why shouldn’t the vaccine-hesitant masses, both conservative and progressive, distrust these authorities? These authorities hate them. They openly, violently, cruelly hate them. They call them rubes and racists. They dismiss their populist objections as ignorant and fascistic. They dismiss the anxieties of the working class as reactionary and proto-fascist. They dismiss objections and scorn their critics as stupid and violent.
What do they have to show for themselves? These same authorities are the people that botched the war in Afghanistan. These same authorities are the people that caused the rise of ISIS. These same authorities oversaw the 2008 economic collapse and are currently overseeing record inflation which they dismiss as “transitory”. They take vacations while the supply chain is breaking down. They fire nurses and doctors for being unvaccinated during a labor shortage. Seventy years ago, these were the same authorities who used free vaccines to inject black men with syphilis as part of a government experiment.
Certainly, much of the paranoia is truly unfounded. It’s irrational to say the vaccines will cause autism. It’s irrational to say the vaccines will implant tracking chips in your arm. It’s irrational to assume that the vaccines are designed to sterilize or kill off large swaths of the public as part of some Bill Gates/George Soros globalist population control scheme.
But is it irrational to say you don’t want to take a vaccine that was made using stem cell research from aborted fetal tissue? Is it irrational to assume that a group of people who have telegraphed to you over, and over, AND OVER AGAIN that it thinks you’re ignorant, stupid, racist, fascistic rubes and tries to label you a domestic terrorist by the Department of Justice for opposing brainwashing children with CRT? Is it irrational not to trust those people when they fire you from your job and put you in forced quarantine facilities against your will for a virus with a 99.6% survival rate?
There are other ethical and scientific concerns about the vaccines that could be raised by cooler heads. Alas, they are dismissed as equally as crazies and conspiracy theoriests. Somehow it’s considered rational and pro-science to enforce mandatory vaccine mandates in major cities like Chicago and New York but these mandates frequently allow NO exceptions. People with legitimate medical exceptions, people whose doctors can attest that the vaccines would be unhealthy for them for various reasons, are being threatened with losing their jobs. People for whom ANY kind of vaccines are a potential death sentence are “anti-vax” under the definition of our political elites.
Trust is a two-way street. It requires that both parties give something and take something in return. Our elites do not give us a reason to trust them. They HATE us, and they show contempt every time they talk to us, with every one of their statements, with their abject refusal to admit when they’re wrong. These are the people who demand obedience and trust but they give us nothing in return, except vaccines. Maybe that’s enough for some people but you can’t blame people from across the political aisle for losing their trust in systems that clearly think lesser of them.
These authorities don’t deserve trust. The science may be right, the numbers may be right, but the authorities are always wrong, especially when they’re right. Until they can put in the most basic honest admission of failure, until they can take credit for the defaulting economy, until they can stop fellating big pharma, the average American of every rate deserves the right to be hesitant and to live their lives freely, free from coercion and punitive action.
If they ACTUALLY cared about people, you would trust them enough to allow them to make decisions for themselves.
Cultural Revue 