Letters: Random thoughts about Americans

COVID-19 vaccinations

More than forty percent of Madera adult are not vaccinated. Many of them say that it’s their “personal choice” to walk among us carrying the virus, infecting us and killing those whom we love.

Damn you. Damn the smug, arrogant ignorance of your selfishness.

Our history tells us that the Founding Fathers established malaria quarantines and imposed smallpox vaccination mandates with penalties imposed on violators. Your “personal choice” is not supported by law. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld public health mandates against the spread of the Spanish flu, polio and COVID-19. Science proves that the COVID-19 vaccines are more reliable than flu shots, cancer treatments and weight loss programs. No major religion preaches self above the greater good. Even the Star Trek movies advance the Spock Doctrine: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

And California school children are already required to be inoculated with ten other vaccines with no exemptions.

COVID-19 is contagious. It can spread from one who feels no symptoms to anyone. It infects. It kills. It kills one thousand times a day in America.

“Personal choice” is a euphemism for a license to kill. It has no legal, religious, scientific, or moral justification. How many of us will you sentence to die alone?

Education

“Adults” at a Clovis school board meeting screamed at a student who dared to speak about mask mandates while other “adults,” including educators who are legally required to protect students from abuse, sat by silently. There are some across America who seek to ban books, and even burn them, without having read them. They act on instant rage perceptions that those books don’t fit into their fantasies of a return to a 1950s white, straight, “good old days” America that didn’t even exist in the 1950s. They whitewash the teaching of painful truths about our past rather than preventing its repetition. Why not calmly work with others on how to present the facts of the last four hundred years in an historically accurate manner? Even if it smarts.

Ignorance, like the virus, is contagious. It also kills. It kills democracy.

Bumper sticker politicians

There are those in public office who seek to help us by repairing our crumbling infrastructure and strengthening our social safety nets before we become a third world country. Alternatively, there are those who pander with sound bites and bumper sticker phrases in front of television cameras espousing lies, hatred, violence, and Orwellian 1984 groupthink. They re-enact the Italian Fascism that led up to World War II. Fascism is represented by anti-democratic right-wing group-think movements focused on a dictator in a capitalist society who promotes racism, violent suppression of the opposition, and belligerent nationalism. Trumpism.

But the newest “conservative” claim amazes me more than usual. They are blaming Democrats for depriving Republican men of their manhood. They bemoan white males whose “personal choice’ is to quit jobs, abandon families, and watch porn and play video games all day while drinking beer. And whining.

Let’s preview the 2024 GOP slogans: “Vote GOP! It’s Better Than Viagra.” “Republicans Are Male Enhancements.” “Liberals Hate the Hard Right.” “At Least Conservatives Are Hard-Headed!”

Bless their hearts. Perhaps in the meantime the CDC will add “loss of Trump Cult manhood” as a high-risk factor contributing to COVID-19 deaths?

— Charles Wieland,

Madera