Go ahead and get the COVID-19 vaccine if you’ve made up your mind, but, mark my words, you’ll be playing with fire.
Just consider all the harm we have already caused from trying to mitigate the damage of risky behavior, which has had the unintended consequence of encouraging that very behavior.
We provide condoms in high schools to cut down on teenage pregnancy, which sends the message that we approve of underage sex.
We provide those same teens with safe rides on prom night, which lets them know we’re sort of OK with them drinking at the dance.
Seat belts. You think people would drive as crazily as they do if they didn’t have seat belts to save them from their foolish habits? Don’t laugh, I’ve seen the studies.
And insurance. Don’t get me started on insurance. How different this world would be if people weren’t forever taking stupid chances, secure in the knowledge that a huge risk pool will ease the burden of failure.
Here’s what will happen. First, a few people will get vaccinated, then a few more, and before you know it people will be talking about “herd immunity” and start losing the rational fear of close human contact.
And then, people will stop wearing masks. They will drift closer than 6 feet apart and, even worse, might even be tempted to touch one another. They will nod and smile and talk too loudly, spraying deadly poison with every word.
Once again, there will be indiscriminate confabulation and rampant rapport and promiscuous social intercourse. And look where that got us.
Oh, relax, I’m just pulling your leg. Figuratively, of course, I’d never get close enough actually do it these days.
The truth is, we’re becoming such a frightened people — and passing the panic on to our remote-learning children — that not even mass immunization is likely to drag us kicking and screaming back into normality.
I imagine people being turned away from home front doors or shunned at church or walked around on the sidewalk unless they display the big “V” embroidered somewhere on their clothing. Not a scarlet one. We have to avoid all shades of blue and red in these divisive times -— black and white for the same reason.
Yellow — a big, yellow V, as if to say, “Yes, I admit it, I’m scared, so I got the shot.”
Or perhaps we can just flash a V with index and middle finger. If it was good enough for Churchill to proclaim victory and unwashed hippies to wish us “peace, man,” it’s good enough to tell our chicken-hearted neighbors we have been vaccinated.
My brother is passing around a C.S. Lewis passage someone posted on Facebook. It’s from his essay, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” and we are advised to replace “Atomic Age” with “COVID-19 Age” as we consider it:
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies, but they need not dominate our minds.
I do not think that Lewis meant for us to ignore danger or pretend that risk does not exist. The fact that we might succumb to cancer or keel over any minute from a heart attack or an embolism is not a valid reason to go stand in traffic and dare the cars to hit us. And as individuals, we have more control over a virus than we do over a possible impeding nuclear holocaust.
But his central point is one to live by. We don’t have to choose between defying risk or being paralyzed by it. We can give it the weight it is due, take whatever precautions are warranted, then simply live our lives, doing the “sensible and human things” that give the world its worth.
It shouldn’t take a pandemic to remind us, but it’s understandable that it did. To be born is to die. It’s what’s in between that counts.
Leo Morris, columnist for The Indiana Policy Review, is winner of the Hoosier Press Association’s award for Best Editorial Writer. Morris, as opinion editor of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, was named a finalist in editorial writing by the Pulitzer Prize committee. Contact him at leoedits@yahoo.com.
