I’m
biased about vaccines. I get that. As a school teacher, I was eligible for my
first Moderna shot in January and got my second one a month later. I have a job
where I share a room with twenty-five different students six times a day. Most
importantly, my seventy-four-year-old dad is on immunosuppression medication,
as is my five-year-old daughter.
So, uh, yeah. I wish all you all would get a
vaccine.
But I respect your decision not to. To each his own.
However, I am a little confused about why governors
who claim to be pro-business are so eager to stop private businesses to take a
very common-sense approach to, well, stay in business. Just this week, the Governors
of Florida and Texas preemptively banned businesses in their states from
requiring patrons to show proof of vaccination, which seems a counterintuitive
way to demonstrate faith in the marketplace.
Now, if the government itself was requiring vaccine
“passports,” or whatever we want to call them, then yeah, I would be a little
skittish.
If we were in a situation where we would have to
prove vaccination status in order to buy staples like food, gas, or medicine,
then I would also be squeamish about diving down that rabbit hole.
But
for a business like a concert hall, for example—that functions on the strength
of how many people it can get packed into its doors—to require all of its
ticket holders be vaccinated against a disease that has a 16-month track record
of killing people and making life miserable just makes logical sense. It seems
a very obvious strategy to use toward reopening society before the end of this,
oh, I don’t know, decade. They are private businesses, after all, that have a
vested interest in their patron’s health, and whether that means requiring
those patrons to wear shoes, a mask, or be vaccinated, then so be it.
The counterargument to this is almost always “well, that’s
just how the holocaust got started. We’re
just one step away from Nazi Germany with these ideas.”
And when I hear that argument, I am very tempted to
ask, “Do you actually believe that’s how the holocaust really “got started,” or
are you just in the business of retweeting nonsense? Are you so chemically
addicted to the “likes” that objective reality no longer serves any purpose?”
Because I want to explain
something: we are always, at all times, about three steps away from Nazi
Germany.
We have always been three or fewer steps away from
genocide. (In fact, we have often been no steps away from genocide.)
All societies
can get from point A, where they’re not massacring a group of people because they
don’t like them, to point Wounded Knee, where they are.
Why? Because humans are often bad people.
However, the historical specifics that led to Hitler
getting elected and then marginalizing entire swaths of humanity before
invading Poland belong to a very specific moment in 20th century
history.
It’s not a casserole recipe.
I’m not suggesting it can’t happen again, or didn’t,
or won’t, but I am suggesting we don’t have to assume every single decision
that doesn’t fit into our preconceived schema about how the world should
function is going to inevitable lead to us all hiding out in someone’s attic
writing in our diaries.
And I’m not trying to minimize what happened in the
holocaust. I’m just tired, after years of both political parties calling each
other Nazis, of being scared of brown shirt boogeymen whose only function, it
seems, is to demonize whatever behavior their political opponent is doing at
that moment.
The “slippery slope” argument—the idea that “once we
head down this path we’re eventually falling off the cliff”—is not how you
govern, it’s not how you solve problems, and it’s certainly not a very healthy
way to live out your own individual life.
It’s crippling. It stifles creative thinking because
it assumes the worst possible outcome for all decisions.
It’s simply fearmongering disguised as philosophical
debate, and it’s really too bad there’s not a vaccine against that.
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