PRIDE CAN KILL YOU
The more I think about this cartoon, the more I think it’s getting at something we don’t admit but is feeding into the refusal of people to get Covid vaccination. In the past they have willingly gotten dozens and hundreds of vaccinations in order to go to school, travel, enter certain job fields — all without much fuss. They agreed to drivers’ licenses and marriage licenses and seat belts and laws forbidding using cell phones while driving. But the Covid vaccination, now plentiful and safe, makes them literally scream and attack. What is it tapping into?
On the same day I asked two women (probably a mistake) whether they had the shots (I was wearing a mask, though it wasn’t required, because they were places where the public came, some from out-of-state.) Both were alert, attractive, intelligent, employed women. I was surprised that they were defiant, confrontive, to different degrees. I quickly backed off. They offered fake science and irrational accusations.
It’s about class, about being “better than you.” The divide in the country over education and income has become so bitter that it controls the Covid discussion. Even my doc was argumentative. I don’t want to take statins for cholesterol and he suggested refusing Covid shots was the same thing. He forgot that cholesterol is not contagious, but Delta Covid in particular is sweeping the world via aerosol contamination of the air. But he’s the same guy who accepted my eleven pages of research about Metformin. When he realized that I had been taking the drug too long, I saw that realization dawn in his face. His prescription for a new replacement drug made my life pleasant again. Then I had to explain to the pharmacist. It’s in the warning literature, but the makers of Metformin don’t want you to think about it.
“Privileged knowledge” and gatekeeper research are part of the problem. Key is the elitism of the STEM field experts in their white coats and organic chemistry degrees VERSUS folk wisdom that comforts us and is passed to us through our families and neighbors. We’ve gotten the idea that doing what our moms taught us is a finger in the eye of the evil scientists.
One of the women advanced on me, demanding whether I’d ever read the label on Vermectin. I’ve never even held a package of the stuff. She began to lecture me about the contents, saying she had used the stuff. I didn’t even know she had a horse. I have never known anyone who dosed a horse for worms. I walked away. If she had been a cat, I would say that she suddenly “engaged in deflection behavior,” meaning doing a flurry of little tasks to use up the energy that had risen in her. She didn’t want to pick a fight that would get her fired.
This most often happens when I deal with second-level female care providers in the new categories we’ve created to help take the load off docs. Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners. They might not feel well prepared, since they mostly learn the data put out by pharma and insurance sources, without any of the culture of physicians, wisdom developed over a thousand years. Often they are people who have spent years as hands-on nurses, responsible for controlling patients until this is part of their identity. If I start resisting, they brandish their power to prescribe medicines that are vital for my survival. This happened to me repeatedly, even with insecure female doctors.
When I managed to get into the U of Chicago Div School, I thought I had at last found a way to become an “intellectual.” It was an elitist idea. I didn’t really care so much about being ordained. Anyway, it’s a mistake to threaten me with removing that, since the UU tradition is “the priesthood of all believers.” Anyone who is present and sees a person’s need can comfort and inspire others. It’s also a mistake to claim that parishioners have employed their minister and can fire them at will. It betrays the same class worry.
Being “brainy” or even being a “nerd” who reads a lot of books has been touted as some kind of superiority, as “owning” the others and possibly being a witch. I kinda get into that myself. But it’s a stigmatizing put-down perpetuated by those who sell college degrees. It’s a medieval idea from the time when books began to be accessible to more than the nobles or the monastic classes. And so it became joined to resentment of authority.
Getting Covid shots implies that those “health” people know better than Fox News couch sitters. (I should HOPE so!!) Some feel sympathy with those loud unacademic people, who are not quite handsome but highly self-promoting, though their claims to fame are marginal. The really smart super-conservatives sneak off and get the shots, but the dumb ones who listen to them from home are regularly dying without free protection. Pride sustains the belief that they’re just as “good,” “smart”, “informed” as big shots, and therefore their decision is just as effective. They mistake stubbornness for loyalty. They have left the idea of citizens and say they are the employers of the government worker bees, therefore entitled to invade their offices, and reject their mandates.
It’s all what the psych people call “projection,” seeing one’s weakness and faults in the other side in order to protect one’s own. It’s not narcissism, since that syndrome is about being too proud of one’s real beauty and appeal, a hubris. There’s no name for a myth about quaking behind a front meant to hide, a characteristic that our culture connects to religious fakers and name hypocrisy. They teach you in a good seminary to be real, authentic.
We should laugh at the silliness of refusing to get a life-saving shot out of political “front” and fake power. At this point so many have died of this conceit that their bodies are stacked in refrigerator trucks because the morgues are overflowing. If you can’t do it any other way, sneak off and get safe secretly. Your mom would want you to do that.
