A few trapped seeds

didn’t let go

~

they don’t know of the ground

they believe

it is not there

~

a few  trapped seeds

sour

and they will

never grow

 

Yesterday I watched an excellent documentary about the animals you can find in Africa. I love these documentaries; it takes you away for a while. I noticed one thing, and it is not the first time; almost all the animals look approachable like you can touch them. I know the rhino is dangerous, but they don’t look all that dangerous. But if I look at the lions, and then to our cat, I know that the lion is dangerous, unapproachable, you might say. It’s something in his eyes; you know he will eat you alive if he gets the chance. It reminds me of something.

I understand that most people who don’t want to get vaccinated for Covid do this because of doubt about safety; they say it is not tested enough. The second reason, from what I understand, is that it interferes with their sense of freedom; they want to decide themselves if they take it or not. I can understand the fear that it might not be safe, but my rationale is that I put my life in other people’s hands all the time. I assume that many knowledgeable people were involved with testing these drugs and that they didn’t test it once, not twice, but many times before they released it. Regular medicine is probably more extensively tested to take away more of the side effects, but it was an emergency. When my doctors subscribe something to me, I assume they know what they are doing the same goes for all the food I buy at the grocery; I assume that there are not too many pesticides left when I buy it.  It helps, of course, that I am not conspiracy-minded; I don’t think that governments work together to poison us. Do they really want to be left with all the conspiracy-minded people? I believe in science and what scientists have done for all of us through the ages; we trust them when we drive our cars, step into an airplane, and when we need surgery.

The other reason often mentioned is freedom and how getting a vaccination interferes with that. First of all, no one is forcing anyone to take a vaccination, as far as I know, you just can’t join the group that has taken it if they don’t want that; that is their freedom.  In Europe, we don’t let older cars on the road if they don’t pass a certain safety test; we take away your freedom to drive with your crapy car on the road that we all share for our safety. Talk about driving. We all agreed to follow certain rules, so driving is safer for all; we indeed take away your freedom to drive on the left side if we all agree that we drive on the right side.

The whole discussion is kind of silly, and if you have taken the vaccination, you will probably agree with me, and if you don’t want to take it because of these reasons as mentioned above, you will probably never agree with reason, science, and logic, because reason developed the medicine that helps to protect the more vulnerable, reason also invented the medium we now use to interact with each other and where some spread miss information.  I’ve seen many interviews with people who don’t take the vaccination for these ridiculous reasons. What annoys me is that they look all serious in the pictures that come with the story. They also look sincere, and they seem to have thought about it…I should stop now because it just irritates me that these people, without any emotion, don’t care that people die because of their selfishness.

It irritates me, and I try to find out why. I can sum up all kinds of reasons why it is illogical, but we are not all that logical. You could even say that most people are not that logical. That’s why many Western countries have some sort of parliamentary system where the “illogical” people can vote for someone to represent them, someone that is supposed to be more logical and does not rule with their stomachs, so to say. Besides the so-called democracies, you will also find systems where one party rules or a king or dictator; all these systems are there to keep the illogical people away from making the big decisions.  

That not all people are logical is, in principle, not a big problem, we are all different. But the majority of people are also not easily influence by conspiracy theories. They don’t have to explain (logically) why the earth is not flat; they just know it because they have it from good authority, like their teacher back at school. But if you, for some reason, don’t trust your teacher, you might question his knowledge. There are, of course, good reasons to question a teacher or any other person with authority,  but people that are prone to believe in conspiracy theories tend to question authorities in general. I “studied” for a while the flat earth community, mainly on YouTube, and I never met a flat-earther that just believed the earth was flat, but for the rest was free from other conspiracies. They often had a whole array of conspiracies, from JFK killing to 9/11 and everything in between. Suspicion of authority is healthy, but if you replace accepted authority with someone that has no or little experience in that field, you enter dangerous ground. Look at what kinds of so-called Covid medicine people take because they read about it on Facebook; how dumb can you be. See also what happened with Trump; his message was: you all stink, and I know better, and you have seen the result, he had no clue what it took to run a country.   The same happened in Germany with Hitler. His whole ideology was based on the conspiracy that the Jews were conspiring to rule the world; when Hitler came to power, he messed it up. He had some success initially, but he lost control, and reality took over pretty soon with the result that Germany was in ruin and millions of people died because some believed that he (Hitler the corporal) knew what he was doing.  

I’ve read somewhere that a small percentage (around 15%) of the people will always believe in conspiracies, are extreme rightwing or leftwing. These people believe that others are actively plotting against them. Probably they think that because that is what they are doing, constantly looking for prey while most people are not interested in them at all, they believe everybody is like them, out to get them. I write about this because I am trying to figure out how to reach these people. I am not the first one and not the only one.