Let's Not Re-Write The Recent Past

Some are already starting to lie to themselves. It will just prolong the problem.

There’s a danger of re-writing history. The selective amnesia that got us into this situation is now being used, selectively, to change the collective memory of events. Recently, Scott Adams, the American cartoonist who was once pro-vaccine and who now admits taking the vaccine was a mistake, stated that having the mRNA jab was a ‘coin flip’ and that the anti-government, anti-vaxxers got lucky.

He elaborated on this a little later with a video by declaring that if you’re anti-government you ‘can’t be wrong’ and this, combined with anti-corporatism, let those resistant to vaccination turn out to be correct in their decision. Only by virtue of a set of political attitudes were people able to avoid the shots; a set of political attitudes that were given to us by our parents, by unique experiences, by falling in with a particular crowd, which, when you think about it, is little more than a coin toss by Fate.

This is not the first example of this attitude over the past few weeks. Although I don’t want to blame the victim, with the vaccine harms movement gaining more and more traction, it is not unusual to hear individuals describe their actions in a past that I recall very differently from the one that is outlined. Recently, an event in Scotland was held highlighting vaccine damage. One of the speakers explained that they had taken the vaccine in order that she and her children could go on holiday abroad. Due to that requirement, her life had been damaged. The NHS had refused to recognise the damage. She was lied to by the government; she was abandoned by the health services. Now, she and the vaccine damage movement were going to be heard by the government and the government was going to be forced to act.

It is sad and tragic what has happened to this lady and what is now probably not thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but millions: millions of people across the world who are maimed. It may get worse too. It probably will. However, the trend towards claiming that the government lied, the government abandoned people, the government must fix this should be moderated with some truths about the circumstances and the individual’s decision to take the vaccine. For a very simple reason: unless we all face the truth about ourselves, we will continue to make the same mistakes as before.

Truth is a natural state. Decades of research has pointed towards an uplifting conclusion: that our bodies, our minds retain the truth of what happens to us. Our reason and imagination can analyse and create alternative scenarios which help clarify that truth. However, our unsatisfied needs, our damage, our trauma can make us wish to deny the truth of our experience. I would suggest that what has happened – although not apparent to everyone yet – is so completely catastrophic for democracy, for families, for humanity, we cannot afford to avoid the painful truth or take part in sugar coating it, out of kindness, even if it seems a harsh not to do so, though hopefully, not cruel.

There were very many lies told about COVID 19 and the vaccine. People can rightly claim, ‘I was lied to’, but even from the very beginning there was enough information available and obvious aspects of personal experience for people to question what they were being told. In a ‘once in a century’ pandemic, the enclosed spaces of supermarkets were kept open. Where thousands of people went daily, they did not die nor did the staff keel over dead. This alone should have been an antiseptic to the terror: the evidence of our own eyes. The illogical masks, restaurant rituals, money paid to dine out(!), Dominic Cummings and Barnard Castle, the evidence continued to aggregate that this was not as serious a situation as had been portrayed.

It is probably at this point that everything else the government had to say about Covid and vaccines was no longer worth paying attention to. Any ‘cure’ should have been treated with extreme scepticism. This did not happen. People rushed to be saved from a virus that was not so much killing people as stopping them ‘from having fun’: needing a vaccine to travel, get into bars and nightclubs and so forth. People were not prepared to deny themselves and lacked the confidence to question or protest, or were not interested enough, preferring easy ignorance and compliance.

Those that did not take the vaccine or who resisted COVID measures to what extent they were able, did so not because they had rolled a dice that day or supported a specific political party. It might have started with an instinct, a feeling of unease, or the illogicality of what was being done could not be ignored. It was wrong – irrational, unscientific and so on, but, definitely, wrong - and they did not want to be complicit with something that was wrong. It’s not one-upmanship or trying to indulge in a sense of superiority to say that to remain unvaccinated required undergoing a little isolation, marginalisation and resistance to pressure for most people. Lied to…by the government, oppressed…by the government and vilified…by the government funded media. And some friends, family and strangers. The majority of those ultimately vaccinated were unwilling to countenance this for whatever reason. Peter Hitchens, journalist and outspoken critic of lockdowns and vaccines, gave into vaccination: he wanted to travel and visit family, he said. Loneliness, absence, perhaps not wanting to become estranged from his conformist readership, all ground away his opposition.

Becoming vaccinated was the easy choice, not the hard one. There was never any evidence it was the sensible choice and it could be argued - and this may seem harsh - that if you were determined to be part of the group, wilfully and determinedly deaf to any counter-argument or even call for caution, absolutist in your own belief in you virtue and knowledge, irrationally frightened of death, unthinking, superficial and glib, fearful of other people’s opinion of you, filled with desire/fear to comply with the powerful for safety or favour, then becoming vaccinated was the only choice. But these are not exactly admirable qualities.

At no point was there evidence that these experimental vaccines were safe. The explanations on TV were nonsensical (why inject yourself with a substance that caused your body to make the very thing you’d spent a year manically avoiding). Why believe them? Why take it? What vaccinated people should do, in my opinion, is find out why they took that vaccine, as a matter of urgency. Why they allowed themselves to believe in a narrative that made Swiss cheese look as solid as the Berlin Wall.

To start asking the very government that damaged you, the corporations, the doctors and nurses - who should have known better - to start listening to you seems to be a little bit degrading. It’s an ‘Everybody else’s fault but mine!’ attitude. It’s not a case of ‘blaming the victim’. It’s a case of asking, when you are a being bullied, how long do you stay in an abusive relationship and not take responsibility for your staying? It’s asking the bully to be nice, instead of taking on the onus of hitting them on the nose.

Given the pain caused, no one wants to add to the suffering. Yet, unless people are prepared to be accountable for their role, however large or small, in all of this, then we not only learn nothing, we cannot move forward. If we cannot move forward, we’ll be back here again soon enough.