On Vaccination, Hope, and Escaping Covid’s Cave
Another pandemic-induced Roaring '20's & John Stuart Mill explains our anti-vax 'patriots'.
Madame Zillette and I had locally grown and harvested Pfizer Juice injected into our arms Wednesday. Dose two is in 3-weeks. On April 21st, we'll each be as protected from this virus as we can. Living in Kalamazoo, I was happy to learn I was getting Pfizered. Kalamazoo’s become homus interuptus over the last 24-years and I’m feeling a new and bizarre sensation: civic and community pride! I’d come to believe such faggy talk was something like tales of The Great Snipe Hunt.
Like Shawshank Red, for a year most of us were afraid to embrace hope for an early release. But there's a weird side effect from getting even the first dose of this vaccine that we and others have noticed: hope! Hope that life is about to finally return to normal. Later in the movie, it was Andy who said hope is maybe the best of things. I don't know about that, but what I do know after having studied the Sausage Party strain for over 3-years is that people need it.
It feels like people are ready to go nuts. Not just our photonegative extremists but the rest of us and in a good way. Someone pointed out that the Spanish Flu pandemic ravaged the pre-vaccine globe 100-years ago. Not coincidentally, the Jazz Age and Roaring 20’s followed on its viral heels. After experiencing a small taste of that relative chaos and mostly secondhand horror over the last year, we can have more long distance understanding of that 1920’s Dufresne Perspective. What we are feeling now the world experienced a century ago; it’s the feeling of a prisoner approaching release day. I don’t know about any of you, but the first thing I’d want to do is have a beer, a steak, and perhaps several hookers. All named Jenny. Atop an ’84 Cavalier. Specific? Yes, but I’d have had time to “plan!”
Clearly, I can empathize with our ancestors enjoying a decadent cultural orgy after enduring the death, destruction, and global devastation of both WW1 and influenza. I think we’re headed toward something similar, if not in scale at least in spirit. Maybe these vaccines will also supply the accidental antidote to our racial vitriol and political division epidemic? Maybe we’ll realize we’d rather party than kill each other, at least for a while? Maybe there will once again be more important things to obsess upon than Dr. Seuss, AOC’s socialism, and Pepe LePew’s overbearing attitude toward unfortunate cartoon cats. Maybe! We can all have hope, right? #FreePepe
At what point does hope mutate toward wishfully delusional thinking?
From research and development to post-Trump distribution, and if the vaccines crush the pandemic, the US response has gotten infinitely better. After months of orange tinted ignorance, incoherence, and political malpractice, this country’s hit such a tentative stride that I dare say the last two months have become the best PR (propaganda, remember) campaign the institution of socialized medicine could hope for! Make no mistake: socialism is exactly what it is.
From Big Pharma’s government-insured R & D to free mass distribution: covid brought European-style medicine to America. And guess what. People like it! More importantly it’s working not just to fight the batdemic but as a reminder that government can be both effective and a positive force in people’s lives. Yes, most are happy, even mildly impressed, with the direction things have turned.
Not everyone, of course. Of course! For millions, those who’ve invested every molecule of their being in the idea that government is always the problem, stories of socialist success are political nightmares threatening their adopted religion: masochistic austerity rebranded as “rugged self-reliance and individualism.”
FRIENDLY WARNING: This goes against The Rules of Successful Inspiration Writing, but if thus far this piece has uplifted you, and a good hard wholesome uplift is what you needed, stop here. No worries! We can catch up later!
Media outlets have highlighted the predictable partisan split between those getting the vaccine and those who refuse. We’ve politicized masks, lockdowns, closures, and even the constitutionally mandated formality of counting Electoral College votes. Why not something as elementary as vaccinations? Most of the patriotic Republican party, at least those identifying as patriotic the way Bruce Jenner identifies as female, have snuggled up next to Jenny McCarthy, Robert Kennedy Jr. and the rest of the Antivax Circus freakshow.
“The Q-Shaman, Jenny McCarthy, and JFK’s nephew walk into a bar…”
Over the last few years, I’ve talked about echo chambers, boutique news, data overload, and what happens when people can’t tell truth from falsehood. (hint: they don’t stay free) I’ve also openly struggled to find, clear, and walk what I’ve called The Path to Empathy. When it comes to vaccine attitudes, I think it’s easy to explain this away with one word, and it’s not “disinformation.” It’s another example of the “can I allow myself to believe this?” post hoc standard. It’s not rational, it’s emotive rationalization. It’s pouting. It’s throwing poo at everyone rejecting Trump and his claims of a “stolen election.”
That short concise word is “butthurt.”
Two words would paint the better picture. Let’s add “fear” to the mix. Fear that a receding pandemic will expose the practical and widespread benefits of socialized medicine administered by an efficient government.
Fear and Loathsome Butthurt in Trumptown. This summer on OAN!
Could it be that simple? Of course. To steal a trendy cliche, I’m not breaking any news:
“So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old.” -John Stuart Mill
Regardless of the images of divine depth and complexity dancing in our heads, people aren’t that complicated. Emotive is the most common kind of reasoning. The one consumed by it is always the last to notice. By the time they do, it’s too late. They’ve invested too much social capital, Face saving social momentum takes over, and the fictional narrative suddenly staggers to life like Frankentrump’s rhetorical monster.
That’s where we are, kids. No vaccine can cure politically charged willful ignorance. Especially when personal branding fuses with an established identity. You can neither save nor reason with these folks. They’re lost. They have to flip the internal cognitive switch themselves.