If you read the title and are strongly pro or anti vaccination, your head and emotions are probably automatically hot and ready like a $5 pizza with rhetoric waiting to find out if you should come at me with preach or condemnation.

Sorry not sorry, but this piece is about understanding why both sides, pro and anti, exists in the first place: how did we get here? A few may stop reading because people sometimes want to feel a sense of righteous knowing above all others instead of employing compassion. Or hey, maybe you’re over it, but that doesn’t make it go away.

Why Are People Anti Vax?

The default is pro vaccination. The government backed by science said jump and most people asked how high. We saw disease riddled conditions around us supporting this call for obedience, so we took the vaccination and things appeared to get better. Then they seemingly didn’t. Thus defiance was born and the people started questioning their jumping high orders.

It’s safe to conclude no one fully trusts the government or science in some way. Today we scoff at laws we couldn’t believe once existed. We think, how barbaric, archaic and ignorant of the government to tell people they can’t marry another race or the same sex, for example. On the other hand, people still exist who believe these ideas to be true. Why? Because we trusted the government.

We also look back at the things done in the name of science via experimentation thinking, how inhumane, deplorable, and heartless. Doctors say one thing is safe today and in a hundred years more or less we find out it wasn’t. Why? Because we trusted science. We always forget scientific progress is built on failure and sometimes that failure is human lives for a profit.

Trust Must Be Earned, Sometimes Renewed

Why is it so surprising people don’t want to trust the government and science about vaccination? We can all name one policy that shakes our moral code and one thing science made us believe that ended up hurting human progress, but we put up with the government and science just fine. We’re more forgiving of these entities who have betrayed us repeatedly and currently than we are understanding of people who we claim to care about. You may say a person triggers you, but why doesn’t the government and science give us waking nightmares?

I know someone who is anti abortion. For her, scientifically and spiritually the child exists as soon as egg meets sperm. You are a murderer who will go to hell if you do it. They believe the government can be trusted to stop people from aborting, but they don’t trust the government where vaccination is concerned. I couldn’t imagine how an intelligent and loving person could have such two very far apart thoughts. I wanted to distance myself so far and fast from them, but I haven’t. It’s been puzzling me for months why I don’t. Otherwise we get along, but I can’t find it in my heart to dismiss their existence from my life entirely even though I’m very pro choice. I thought perhaps maybe I’m not as pro choice as I think, but that’s not it.

Cancel Culture

There’s an amazing article about “cancel culture” that I think everyone reading this should read. It talks mostly about people online who say something problematic and are essentially dragged through the internet sphere without regard for one thing: failing to “recognize that people are able to, and routinely do, develop new ideologies over time and shed ones that they’ve outgrown“. We can sometimes be so unforgiving of people who do outgrow old ideas and trust me, I get it. You’ve been trying to tell them fivever that they have it twisted and nada.

I can’t cancel this person out of my life because we all have some sort of brainwashed government, cultural, scientific, religious, or personal ideology that will be proven incorrect in our lifetime. It’s hella tiring to have opposing energy in my space, but if you know better, unfortunately with the great power of wisdom comes the responsibility, though that’s not to say you shouldn’t take care of yourself first. I wish all the non biased white people would talk to the racist ones, but sometimes I gotta step in instead of waiting for a white savior to fix the problem their ancestor’s started. Still I have to choose when for my own sanity because I can’t fight all the battles.

Consider this a blueprint reminder of understanding not just anti vaxxers, but any opposing ideologies to your own. We will cancel our friends and family subscriptions more easily than the government, corporations, pharmaceutical companies, science, technology, media, and so much more. We all know these entities are presently screwing us over in one way or another, but we still show up for them. I know what Walmart does and I still went there and got watermelon two sizes of my head for $7 instead of the local market where it’s less than the size of my head for $.99/lb. I tell myself I deserve three times the watermelon. Say I do, but at what cost? Where is the line? Why do we allow one but not the other?