I have an email pen pal. Those of you over 40 can explain what that is to those of more tender years.
He goes by the name Senior Citizen and he is not bashful in writing to me often with some critique of the world or, more particularly, of me. I welcome it as I do all thoughtful responses.
Thursday morning I got this:
“Brian, the morning news said that 1/3 of Americans plan not to get the COVID-19 vaccination. Dr. Fauci says that 85% of Americans must vaccinate in order to achieve herd immunity. No one, again no one, is telling people they’re foolish if they choose to risk the disease rather than risk the vaccine. Are they foolish? COVID-19 is known to kill millions of people and to leave many survivors with lingering health problems. The vaccine offers no known similarly significant after effects. Yes, they’re foolish, but also uninformed. Who’ll be first in the nation to publicly condemn decisions not to vaccinate, and who’ll be first to publicly urge citizens to recognize the benefit of vaccination, against the risk of not vaccinating?
"It could be you Brian. Would you?”
My fellow senior, that’s all we do these days is tell people about vaccinations and share the experts’ advice about stepping up and taking one in the arm for what will be a grateful nation. And we will continue to scream it from our pages.
The real question is why aren’t people listening or why won’t they hear the truth about these vaccines and the good they can do for this entire country?
What are we missing in the telling that leads people to believe that which isn’t true?
Like many Americans, I have been listening to the impeachment hearings in the U.S. Senate. The entire country could have heard the House impeachment managers make the case — unequivocally — that our then-president, Donald Trump, incited violent rioters with his words, his actions and, yes, his inaction.
When he needed to stop the violence that ransacked the Capitol and laid waste to the concept of a peaceful transition of power, which has been a hallmark of our democracy and which made us the envy of the world, he did nothing. And then he did a little more than nothing.
The Republicans, anxious not to incur the ongoing wrath of a con man, are hanging on the fiction that just because Trump may have encouraged the crowd to commit mayhem, murder and worse doesn’t make him guilty of inciting insurrection. But it does make those people who did his bidding guilty of the worst attack on our Capitol in almost forever.
Which brings me back to the Senior Citizen’s question about why aren’t 35% of the American people doing what is in their best interests, their neighbors’ best interests and their country’s best interests?
And that is: What is it about some significant portion of the citizenry that makes them so ignorant of the facts, so unknowledgeable of the realities on the ground and so oblivious to what should be an obvious and very bright line of right and wrong? And what is it that makes them believe that the lies Trump has told them are anything more than lies?
Why would any sane person think it is OK to march on the Capitol and threaten the lives of the people who work there? Scratch that, take the lives of some people who work there?
I don’t know the answer — and not knowing worries me about what may come in America — but I do know it is an answer not much different from the question about why people won’t be vaccinated.
With the caveat that there may be a very few people who have religious arguments against vaccination — although I have never understood how people can believe that God would want his children to die from COVID-19 when they could do something about it — there is no good reason for the vast majority of the naysayers to jeopardize themselves, their neighbors, their communities and their fellow countrymen by nixing the life-saving needle.
I remember as a young boy in the late 1950s a poll that had just been released that showed almost 30% of Americans believed Harry Truman was the president of the United States. This poll was taken in the middle of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second term as president.
Perhaps we are just doomed as a country to have up to one-third of the people in the United States living in a constant state of ignorance — willful or otherwise — about the very basic facts of life in this great country.
If so, then getting the name of the president wrong is one thing, a very little thing.
But failing to vaccinate for the benefit of family, friends and neighbors is something altogether different. It’s a very big thing.
And attacking the seat of government to prevent the U.S. Congress from carrying out its most fundamental responsibilities under our Constitution, that’s unfathomable. And, yet, it has all happened.
And the best we can get from the Senate of the United States of America is to countenance such behavior, such ignorance, such undeniable criminality.
There is a word for the Republican inaction.
It’s deplorable.
Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.