My heart rails day and night about the selfish Americans who were super slow to get vaccinated or who still refuse to get vaccinated. (And, again, if you read me regularly you know that I’m referring only to the great majority who are unvaxxed for reasons not related to sincere, long-standing religious practices or because of true medical conditions that contraindicate the vaccine.)
The vax-delayers and vax-deniers?
I think the Talking Heads wrote a song about them once.
Despite all the pleas, the financial incentives, the free coffees or pizzas, the celebrity shout-outs, we realize we can't influence the non-vaxxers with reason, science, or appeals to basic human decency and saving the lives of others. Vax delayers and deniers are selfish, dangerous, and deluded human beings. They will or they won't get vaccinated but it won't be because they're doing it for their community, for their country, or even for their loved ones.
It will always be something they do only for themselves. And, that's the bigger, much more insidious problem we will face as individuals and as a country.
Vax delayers and deniers pretty much don't give a shit about anybody but themselves.
So the question for the rest of us is: Why are we still playing nice in the sandbox with them?
They like to tout themselves as though they're some version of independent-minded, MAGA-loving, freedom-defenders, contained in their own little worlds and not hurting anyone else with their insouciant self-orientation. They take from society daily, incrementally, imperceptibly, every day -- with supreme indifference, deficit of compassion, and a profound lack of appreciation.
Delayers and deniers have, for months, spread their deadly indifference to others -- like Covid -- infecting increasingly larger concentric circles.
The horse is out of the barn on the spreading of the physical disease. What worries me most now is that they're spreading a disease of the soul, infecting others so that they think like them, infecting the sane among us with resentment and anger, infecting communities with an increasing social and emotional chasm between the decent and the decidedly indecent.
They're infecting America with their relentless self-absorption to the point that already, but even more so eventually, there is no commonality at all -- because community evaporates under hysterical and stubborn self-interest.
Vax-delayers and vax-deniers? Both are equally responsible for where we're at right now. With the pandemic at its worst because of a variant that most experts say could have been avoided by mass vaccination as soon as vaccines were available. Some of these same experts are now predicting that we'll experience more variants one right after another, deadlier and harder to stop -- maybe even impossible to stop.
So, why are so many of us staying on friendly or social terms with the people who are destroying our country?
It comes down to balls, really.
Too many of us with too few of them. Myself included. (I've been polite on several Zooms with a person who long held out against vaccination -- when what I really wanted to do was scream some sense into her. Might have done that too, except common sense is a vaccine that won't ever work on people whose sense of communal decency is overrun by their outsized sense of personal entitlement.)
What we -- the still sensible, the ones who still care enough to act on behalf of the whole rather than the part --what we need to do immediately is stop being phonies and hypocrites. Stop pretending. Stop acting as if we "like" or find acceptable the very people who are destroying our communities and contributing to chaos, pain and suffering, and death.
We need to take swift action to repudiate and renounce relationships with people we know personally who have refused to get the vaccine for months on end but very recently have — as well as the people who are still refusing.
More than I loathe people who still won't get vaccinated, I am outraged by the people who wouldn't get vaccinated for months on end but who now will for purely selfish reasons. (Don't get me wrong -- glad that anybody gets vaccinated because that helps the whole, just find their late-in-the-game self-serving reasons despicable.)
The slow-to-vaxxers are the people who sat back and counted on others getting vaxxed to hopefully stem the tide of the pandemic. They didn't care how many people had to die in the process or how much they delayed the end of the pandemic. They didn't care if their selfishness ate the country alive.
"Maybe I'll do it later when it's been proven more," they said (proven at the risk and guts of others).
"It's just not something I'm comfortable with," they whined (while doctors and nurses were "uncomfortable" for unending shifts watching patients die).
"It's a personal choice," they philosophized (and these are often the same people who would do away with a woman's reproductive choices).
A couple of months ago, I heard one unvaxxed woman -- a woman whose job involves going in and out of different households every day -- say that the only thing that would make her get vaxxed is if she couldn't go on an international trip she'd been planning for some time because of vax requirements for travel.
A man I know has steadfastly refused the vaccine. Contracted the variant; unwittingly could have spread it to how many others before he got tested; has recovered but is still unlikely to get vaxxed.
Another woman, long opposed to getting vaccinated, only recently got vaxxed after someone she's closely associated with became seriously ill from the Covid variant. "I didn't want any part of that [being sick]," she said, by way of explanation, apparently oblivious (or indifferent) to the transparent depths of her me-me-me attitude.
Wow. Stop for just a moment and consider the vast quality of their selfishness: Their unwillingness to get vaxxed -- and the unwillingness of millions of others like them -- is what has contributed to the development of the variant -- and helped cause thousands more deaths and countless more suffering by the sick and by the caretakers of the sick. But it is only now when the pandemic hits super close to home or might interfere with vacation travels that they take action.
Not when it was killing people they didn't know. Not when medical workers were pleading for relief from the daily deluge of death, catastrophic illness, and mayhem in hospitals. Not when refrigerated trucks were lining up outside of hospitals to collect the body bags. Not when babies died. Not when mothers who'd just given birth died before they could even hold their babies. Not when grandparents died alone without a hand to hold onto. Not when doctors and nurses started dropping like flies. Not for others. Not for their country.
Just for their own damn selves.
I can't stomach these people. And I refuse to pretend that I can. I refuse to be part of the problem by acting like what they're doing and what they've done for months is okay on any level. And, I won't. Despite the relationship kerfuffles that will result, I won't have another thing to do with these psycho killers.
There is little companionship with a run of the mill fool. But there is, literally, no companionship — nor friendship — possible with a careless, thoughtless, and profoundly selfish fool.
And if you think there is, then you, my friend, are the bigger fool by far.
P.S. I’d love to hear your opinion or thoughts on this essay!
Every word and step you take, I’ll be agreeing with you. Thanks MC for having “the balls” to step into the light of reason and not staying in the (potentially) comfortable shadows.
Yes. They are stupid, silly and selfish.