Got my second shot today!
(When will I start getting 5G?)
Look, there’s an awful lot of information available today. Some of it is good, some of it is bad, and some of it is just what we have.
But if we’re going to be people who claim to care—to care about truth and our shared humanity—we need to be really careful what information we put stock in.
I’ll give you an example that broke my heart just today.
While I was waiting to get my shot this morning, a very old man with obvious problems walking and hearing, was waiting for his prescription to be filled. When he got his medication from the pharmacist and turned around, a guy in his late forties—healthy looking—who was sitting in a damned chair while this old man was standing there, bracing himself against a Pepto-Bismol display, said to him:
“You know man, I saw a video online about how bad that stuff is for you! It’s got all kinds of chemicals in it that’s bad for you! I was on that stuff but after I saw that video I told them I don’t wanna take it no more!”
The old man with the hearing aids worryingly looked back and forth from the bag in his hands to the pharmacy counter.
If they hadn’t called my name at that exact moment, I might have said something to that guy who was so concerned for the wellbeing of this old man that he couldn’t give up his seat for him. It would have been something regretted or could have sparked an incident for which I could have eventually been arrested, lol.
Something along the lines of…
Do they give those dirty trucker hats out when you graduate from med school?
(Absolutely nothing against truckers, you beautiful hard working people!)
It made me so angry. The look on that old man’s face—the look of, “Who do I trust?”
That medication might have been a lifeline for him.
A way to keep his heart beating.
A way to keep his muscles from spasming.
A way out of pain.
And who knows how long he suffered before he had the courage to talk to his doctor (you know, the people who graduate med school and generally care about the patients they treat…)?
But thank god no-manners no-medical-education aside from the university of youtube dude was there to save the day.
I’ve always heard about how worried conservatives are about the government getting between us and our doctors.
How about the fear of dumb shits like this getting in between an old man and his doctor?
Look…
I’m not here to tell you what to think.
But I would ask you to consider how the sources you trust affect other people.
That is, if you give two shits about other people.
Does that mean that we shouldn’t live with a healthy amount of skepticism? Absolutely not.
Does it mean that we should implicitly trust the information we’re given? Absolutely not.
Does it mean that things aren’t complicated and messy? Absolutely not.
But often, when we find ourselves drawn down rabbit holes of rumor, myth, and conspiracy, what we’re really after is control.
We’re trying to control situations we can’t otherwise understand.
We’re putting a name on some amorphous, unknowable as a method of self-soothing.
We find other self-soothers online and we say, “See—there’s someone else who thinks like me! I knew I wasn’t alone!”
And we perpetuate the cycle of skepticism and allow it to branch into new topics. And on and on we go.
Until you’re plopped into a chair that a wobbly old man desperately needs to sit in.
But instead of standing your dumb, healthy ass up, you tell him not to take his medication.
I got my second Pfizer shot today.
But that dude was a much bigger prick.
P.S. Thank you to all medical, pharmacy, scientific, etc., personnel. You truly are heroes.