(July 27) Most adults who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus bear some attitudinal resemblance to the dwarves in The Last Battle of the Narnia series.
Offered a chance at salvation from ruin, the dwarves refuse to accept it because they insist that all authorities, including those who try to offer them hope, are untrustworthy. Literally sitting in paradise, they believe and insist they are in the dark corner of a smelly stable. Offered a magnificent feast, they insist the repast consists of old turnip bits and water from a donkey trough.
“At any rate, there’s no Humbug here,” they say to each other. “We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
Aslan, the Lion-Christ, explains to others baffled by the dwarves’ behavior: “They will not let us help them. … Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
To be emphatically clear: It’s not that they are evil or even stupid. They are just stubborn. They have been misled by voices of authority so many times that their automatic response is to disbelieve what they are told, to insist they are self-reliant, and to stick up for their tribe and its preferred view of the world, no matter what.
If you listen to many (not all) of today’s vaccine refuseniks, you hear similar arguments. As in: “Fauci lied about masks, so why should we believe him or ‘experts’ now?” Or: “The government shut down our schools even though it turned out that children are unlikely to contract, or be superspreaders of, the virus — so why should we trust the government on vaccines?” They (whoever “they” are) say they’re trying to save me, but I can take care of myself, thank you very much.
The unvaccinated are for the unvaccinated.
One can empathize with them but still insist they’re wrong — which they are…. [To read the science and logic that explains exactly why they are wrong, without any doubt at all, please follow this link.]
