The daily default assault on our democracy has become so comprehensive that it’s tough for any single reality to stand out. But a recent NBC poll got my attention when it revealed only 49% of US adults surveyed “strongly support the use of vaccines”. Roll that around in your head for a bit and see if you don’t get woozy. They tried to calm me down by adding that another third “somewhat support” vaccine use, but I know what weak tea “somewhat” is, so it didn’t work.
Just so we’re clear, this means roughly half the people who are allowed a vote on who gets to be in charge around here aren’t all in on something that has saved 154 million lives in the past 50 years – almost all of them children under 5. Nobody hates kids that much. It’d be interesting to know how many folk who cast ballots for the public health nightmare that is Trump 2.0 wouldn’t have survived to voting age had it not been for vaccines.
In Florida, where the state motto is “If It’s Impossibly Stupid, You’ll Find It Here First”, the brains trust that runs things has decided childhood vaccines should be a parental choice instead of the traditional government mandate. In one of those increasingly common statements that should have caused the speaker’s head to explode, Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo said of vaccine mandates, “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.” For extra irony, he’s black.
Every day you think it can’t get any weirder or more distressing, and every day it does. Almost everything used to take place between admittedly wide but largely knowable parameters. That’s no longer true, and few of us realised how reliant our whole thing was on the truthiness of those who take oaths to uphold a document most of us know precious little about.
When those charged with checking and balancing choose to lie down instead, the guardrails disappear, and democracy becomes simply a money and power grab for those who already have too much of both. And when the grubbiest and greediest of them all has power like none before, well, it makes it hard to know what to do.
So we resist. We’re part of the resistance. Last Saturday, we resisted at a Free DC rally at Malcolm X Park with a few thousand like-minded humans, and I wish it had been more reminiscent of all the Vietnam War and Civil Rights-era marches I went on as a kid.
It wasn’t, for a slew of sad reasons – among them that too many in the crowd were my contemporaries who had come out of mothballs for the event, and it lacked the anger and urgency of the insurgency of my youth. Back then, we knew Richard Nixon was corrupt, but Congress and the Supreme Court didn’t live in his pockets like today’s versions do in Trump’s, and you just felt like things would work out.
It sounds crazy now, but if Nixon hadn’t resigned, he’d have been impeached and convicted, likely with almost all Republicans voting to convict. It was a very different time. People had to read to get their news, or choose from three TV networks, none of which favoured any political party or philosophy. Hell, corporations weren’t even considered people back then. The system’s always been rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, but somehow it seems more intractable now than ever.
In the midst of all this depressing crap, I butt-WhatsApped a Kiwi friend; amazingly, given the time difference, not while he was sleeping. We had a lovely accidental catch up, but it took me back to last February’s trip there, and the wonderful, if temporary, Trump-free normalcy it brought.
We clicked off, and I foolishly clicked on The New York Times home page to read about Trump’s uber-creepy birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein, an RFK Jr report that calls for continuing to investigate “vaccine injuries” – code for his obsession with finding the non-existent link between vaccines and autism – and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You know, a Wednesday.
