The vaccine refusers, aka “The man who never descended the stairs”

 

My dorm-mate Al and I were precociously immature college freshmen, certainly during our first semester. New friends, we’d be standing in the hallway talking as another student, far end of the hall, approached the stairwell door. At that moment, we’d yell: “Get out!” as if we were decreeing the banishment of this subservient person. He would of course proceed through the doorway, possibly momentarily flustered and certainly roll­ing his eyes at our silliness. Imag­ine, you and I, one and all, how ascendantly immature he would have been had he suddenly stopped, arms crossed, glaring at us haughtily, refus­ing to descend the stairwell in righteous oppo­sition to our command.

He would, if so, be no other than the countless persons who continue to refuse a poten­tially life-saving vaccine because someone told them to get it.

If you own yourself, if you have real not résumé self-esteem, you will not be ruffled by the fact that you are required to do something that is right, which you would have done by your own lights in the absence of a mandate. But to live by contrast, to live by defiance, is to be very little, possibly nothing, in your­self. It is, in fact, to be the “Oppositional-Defiant” child who must resist being engulfed by his parents’ hegemony, their toxic denial of his per­son­hood. At this critical junc­ture he can only remain alive by being “not-them.” If along the way he is never helped, he will remain the de-entity child forever.

This is the noble soul, the vaccine renegade. Or as my daughter would say, the “rebel without a clue.”

There is no doubt that over the past few years, a broad swath of our citizenry have revealed their infantile bona fides in stunning ways. Denying clear truths: who won the election, the Capitol coup attempt, the thousands of lies of Donald Trump which they will not see. They have shown their infantile sociopathy in race and ethnic hatreds; their formative corruption in giving their heart to an actual psychopath. The majority of us are stupefied, because it is like a dream or drugged aberration to see so many lost and angry children walking among us.

There is no shame in having contempt for these rebel babies of high dudgeon – swallowing bleach and horse dewormer and waving torches – for their igno­rance, their puerile dignity. With freshman philosophy and sophomoric science, they miss perceiving something of critical importance: their cartoonish ridiculousness for abdicating reality. They may be power players like Joe Rogan, senators, hard and bold blue-collar workers, nurses or doctors, pundits or presidents. They have made their sandbox their soapbox, their mountaintop. And in such quotidian derangement, they are the solvent disintegrating our culture and our country. There may be no hope but to offer a prayer:

“Mr. G. Zus,” as Al used to write. “Jesus Christ.”