Teeter Totter

 

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 20^th 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.