The great Twitter bunfight about dealing with the vaccine-resistant is still raging, and my position can be summarized as follows:
insulting and belittling and screaming at people who won’t get vaccinated is unlikely to change their minds, and will probably make them dig in further;
but, at some point those of us who are vaccinated should not have our lives constrained because of people who think vaccines will put nanobots in their bodies or something.
David Frum has just about had it:
Pro-Trump vaccine resistance exacts a harsh cost from pro-Trump loyalists. We read pitiful story after pitiful story of deluded and deceived people getting sick when they did not have to get sick, infecting their loved ones, being intubated, and dying. And as these loyalists harm themselves and expose all of us to unnecessary and preventable risk, publications—including this one—have run articles sympathetically explaining the recalcitrance of the unvaccinated. These tales are 2021’s version of the Trump safaris of 2017, when journalists traveled through the Midwest to seek enlightenment in diners and gas stations.
Reading about the fates of people who refused the vaccine is sorrowful. But as summer camp and travel plans are disrupted—as local authorities reimpose mask mandates that could have been laid aside forever—many in the vaccinated majority must be thinking: Yes, I’m very sorry that so many of the unvaccinated are suffering the consequences of their bad decisions. I’m also very sorry that the responsible rest of us are suffering the consequences of their bad decisions.
As cases uptick again, as people who have done the right thing face the consequences of other people doing the wrong thing, the question occurs: Does Biden’s America have a breaking point? Biden’s America produces 70 percent of the country’s wealth—and then sees that wealth transferred to support Trump’s America. Which is fine; that’s what citizens of one nation do for one another. Something else they do for one another: take rational health-care precautions during a pandemic. That reciprocal part of the bargain is not being upheld.
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Compassion should always be the first reaction to vaccine hesitation. Maybe some unvaccinated people have trouble getting time off work to deal with side effects, maybe they are disorganized, maybe they are just irrationally anxious. But there’s no getting around the truth that some considerable number of the unvaccinated are also behaving willfully and spitefully. Yes, they have been deceived and manipulated by garbage TV, toxic Facebook content, and craven or crazy politicians. But these are the same people who keep talking about “personal responsibility.” In the end, the unvaccinated person himself or herself has decided to inflict a preventable and unjustifiable harm upon family, friends, neighbors, community, country, and planet.
We will need a combination of carrots and sticks to get the holdouts vaccinated. The carrots include talking to them like adults (and as anyone who’s spent more than two minutes on Twitter knows, that can be an excruciating test of mental strength) and reassuring them that the vaccines are safe and effective. The sticks include telling them that if they won’t get vaccinated, it’s on them to stay home while the rest of us go about our lives.
The National Football League isn’t forcing its players to get vaccinated (I’m not sure the law, or the collective bargaining agreement with players, would allow it to do so) but it’s making it very clear that if there’s an outbreak because you refused to get inoculated against COVID-19, you could forfeit the game and your salary:
As the NFL approaches the 2021 season, the league informed clubs that it would not extend the season to accommodate a COVID-19 outbreak among unvaccinated players that causes a game cancellation.
NFL Network's Tom Pelissero reported Thursday that the NFL sent a memo to its clubs stating that if a game cannot be rescheduled during the 18-week schedule due to a COVID-19 outbreak among unvaccinated players, the team with the outbreak will forfeit and be credited with a loss, per sources informed of the situation.
In addition, players on both teams will not be paid for the lost contest, and the team responsible for the cancelled game due to unvaccinated players will cover financial losses and be subject to potential discipline from the Commissioner's office.
At least one assistant coach has already chosen freedom from Bill Gates’ nanobots over his career. And Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott doesn’t sound too enthused about vaccination, either:
Imagine if Dallas makes the Super Bowl and ha ha ha it took me a second to realize what I was writing there.
Honestly, the greatest motivator for getting people vaccinated might be the steady drumbeat of bad news about COVID-19. News about the impending Delta variant is what got me to abort my participation in a vaccine study and get the approved Moderna shot. And rising case numbers in some parts of America may indeed be pushing the vaccine hesitant off the fence:
Is “cancel culture” burning itself out? Zaid Jilani at Persuasion looks at some recent polling data suggesting that younger people - whom Gen X curmudgeons like me assume are driving this phenomenon - have just about had their fill of it:
The firm Morning Consult polled a range of Americans about their views on cancel culture, looking at different generational cohorts: Generation Z (Americans born in the years 1997 through 2008), millennials (1981 through 1996), Generation X (1965 through 1980), and the baby boomers (1946 through 1964). Of course, polls should not be treated as definitive on their own, as they are imperfect snapshots in time, and opinions can certainly change.
Nevertheless, this new data is a hopeful indication that cancel culture may have peaked. Overall, cancel culture is quite unpopular among all cohorts, with each generation viewing it more negatively than positively. Millennials appeared to be most supportive of cancel culture: 19 percent said they had a positive view of it, while 22 percent were neutral, 36 percent were opposed to it, and 22 percent said they had no opinion.
Perhaps surprisingly, given its progressive leanings and similar social and political beliefs to the millennial generation, Gen Z was the cohort most opposed to cancel culture: 55 percent said they had a negative view of cancel culture, 8 percent were supportive of it, 18 percent were neutral, and 19 percent had no opinion. Moreover, it’s the youngest cohort within Gen Z—currently ages 13 to 16—who are most opposed to cancel culture, with 59 percent having a negative view of it. That number falls to 48 percent for the oldest cohort within Gen Z—ages 21 through 24.
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…Millennials came of age at a time when the internet was slowly introduced into every facet of our lives. They still have a bit of separation between the internet and the real world. When someone is piled on or even fired for an embarrassing old tweet or Facebook status, a millennial’s first impulse is often to think that this person simply shouldn’t have shared that thought online. It’s easy enough for them to shrug off these events as simply a matter of personal failings.
Gen Z, on the other hand, has grown up immersed in the internet and social media. To them, the barrier between what’s personal and what’s public is fluid, and many Americans of this age don’t find it particularly unusual to broadcast everyday life and thoughts to the entire world. A puritanical mindset that seeks to persecute people over the expression of their beliefs is hard to reconcile with a world where so much of what was once private is now public.
The teens in this generation have also had to deal with the ever-present reality of their peers being dogpiled for their social media posts. A teacher I met recently described to me how her classroom’s entire climate would be affected by events that had occurred earlier that day on social media. Gen Z has first-hand knowledge of this Panopticon-like environment and how suffocating it can be.
I’ve often wondered if my tween and teen years would have been better or worse had the internet been around. (I was in my second year of university when I got an email account, and my third year when someone told me I could use the Mosaic web browser in the computer lab.) It might have connected me to similarly outcast youth, but also opened me up to new and creative means of bullying. And considering that I was just as opinionated (and arguably even more obnoxious) back then, I’m sure I would have posted things that would have gotten me cancelled several times over.
Today’s youth risk that every time they open a social media app. No wonder they don’t like walking that tightrope very much.
Getting back to Bill Gates, the nanobots he’s been sneaking into the vaccines (and which, I must say, have improved my cell phone reception markedly since I got my second Moderna shot) have paid off nicely:
I don’t begrudge the man his toys, but as the narrator notes (and as Gates himself acknowledges) it’s a neat trick to be an environmental activist and own four private jets, a helicopter and a seaplane.
At least he doesn’t own a jumbo jet. For that, you have to be a scandal-plagued televangelist. (Redundant, I know.)
I also first encountered internet in the form of Mosaic (which I will forever associate with the screaming whine of the dot matrix printers, due to spending many hours in the lab typing papers in my early 20s…)