Opinion | Anti-vaxxers are not a monolith, and viewing them as 'immoral crystal-lickers' gets us nowhere. By kelkord.
courtesy of Occupy Democrats, a liberal political social media outlet. It detailed a Chicago judge's decision to revoke a divorced mom's custody of her 11-year-old child because, as it turned out, the mom was unvaccinated. The tweet's kicker:"RT IF YOU SUPPORT THE JUDGE'S DECISION TO PUT THE CHILD'S SAFETY BEFORE HER MOM'S DANGEROUS IGNORANCE!"
In fewer than 50 words, the tweet sketched an inadvertent caricature of how the mainstream, pro-vaccine discourse has sabotaged its purported cause — getting more vaccine doses into more people's arms. With ghoulish moralism, we've dug in our heels without noticing how handily we've shat the bed. I say"we" because I, as a vaccine-loving moralizer and finger-wagger, am definitely part of the problem. I'm as guilty as anyone of"well actually" subtweets and puffed-chest smack-talk against the imagined hordes of unvaccinated crystal-lickers. Like so many others in the pro-vaccine camp, I've made the mistake of approaching vaccination like a moral equation. Instead, we need to accept that anti-vax fervor has become a totem of people's identity.
My friend is not a conspiracy theorist. They're not even against vaccination, per se. In fact, this person doesn't fit the popular anti-vax stereotype of a meme-chasing, political conservative. Rather, they are an ardent longtime socialist with a degree from an elite private American college, blazingly intelligent, passionate, and well-read.
It's self-serving, too. When we choose to see anti-vaxxers as the victims of their own faulty logic, those of us who are vaccinated get to see ourselves, by extension, as altruistic critical thinkers. I'm sorry, but we're not. Most of us just want our lives back, and we're happy to take the path of least resistance to get there. It should come as no surprise that in our fragmented, deeply unequal and profoundly alienated society, others' paths will follow a different route.
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