In Violation Of Reason

It seems to go back a way, but I can’t tell how far. And it has just been repeated by some fucking hysterical nut somewhere in the United States during a protest.

A vaccine for COVID-19 mandate for school students above a certain age is…well, it’s being …

What the fuck. How do I write this?

“This is rape,” some mother says. In front of children, in front of cameras, in front of God and everyone.

Holy shit.

No, it isn’t. It’s just a fucking shot, you fucking idiot, and how dare you compare it to the ultimate sexual violation?

I didn’t know this was a thing. I didn’t know it went at least back to Australia and New Zealand ca. 2015.

I’ve never heard or read anything so infuriatingly stupid or offensive. The video on CNN hit me like a brick to the face. I mean, what?

An incredible and very sad moment recorded for the masses.

***

And look. I understand fear. I know where it comes from and I know the desperate things it can drive a person to do. I get it.

But this hysteria over vaccines is so misplaced that people have died because of it.

As it happens, I’ve studied cases of mass hysteria, and I’m sure that’s not what’s going on here.

One sad thing I’ve learned is that history is often badly misrepresented in the Era of Mass Media, the Age of Knowledge, as it were.

It has often been written that one night in October of 1938, a radio show by Orson Welles and a bunch of great writing talent broadcast a news-style version of the H.G. Wells novel War of the World’s and gave the setting as New Jersey instead of England. During the show, “special bulletins” updated listeners on the progress Martian invaders were making as they sacked New Jersey. That had to be hilarious. Jersey!

The one place real Martians would not dare to exit their parked starship! They’d have found far more plunder in Texas, and it would have been so poetic.

Welles later was called on to humiliate himself and explain what he had intended and to express sincere surprise that his audience had taken any part of it as real.

Modern sources like to blame Welles for the current fake news crisis, which is so far away from the truth that it’s appalling. Welles was portrayed decades later in a made-for-TV movie as people across the country took up shotguns and farm implements and waited for the invaders, who of course never showed up.

Evidence of disclaimers broadcast before, during and after the show are still claimed to have been aired, and there is no reason to doubt this. By the end of the broadcast, Welles said that it was the equivalent of the network putting on a sheet like a ghost costume and yelling “Boo!” But, according to Britannica, the damage was done. I’m not sure what damage the article means; no casualties were ever reported.

More archaic accounts of mass hysteria are far worse. The Christian inquisitions and witch executions across Europe and the New World were perfect examples; owing to a single story in the Bible, witches and non-witches alike were tortured and killed. Neighbors accused friends and watched then hang.

***

Then there were the nuns of Loudon, the famous dancing “fever” in which people died of exhaustion and possibly heart attacks. The Seattle windshield folly. History is full of examples. Some are correctly retold and some are embellished to include paranormal elements. One would think that, given so many calamities of such a nature, that today we would be immune to the phenomenon.

We are not.

Death stalks the misinformed and the believers of propaganda. It strikes down without warning those who take up the fear of lies without questioning them. Some late news on COVID-19 indicates a downward trend in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. The same reports indicate higher numbers of the vaccinated population.

That’s welcome news, but we who face reality know that this crisis is not over. We know that there have been cases of breakthrough covid, and that boosters are necessary. We’ve learned about “long covid”. We are threatened by the unvaccinated to at least some small extent. It is not over. Autumn in the Northern hemisphere won’t help. And the virus continues to mutate. We hope that vaccination programs have weakened it but viruses usually find new ways to attack. With anti-vaxxers getting their warped messages on cable news, and free passes on Facebook, the threat will not magically vanish.

COVID-19 has changed the world forever. How much more damage it will cause is up to us. And refusing vaccines because of fake news and conspiracy theories is irresponsible and unreasonable.

But comparing inoculations to being raped is a horror. It scares the impressionable, children don’t understand, and all it does is insult real rape victims, myself included, and cause the division in this country to grow.

In the end, rational people don’t do this shit, whether they want to be vaccinated or not. It takes a high level of crazy to make such a comparison, and you can’t fix crazy.