“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
Over the gate to Auschwitz the Nazis hung a lie: Arbeit macht frei. It means “Work makes you free,” but most of the victims who passed under the sign experienced neither work nor freedom, but only choking fear and death. Most of the remnant spared to do slave labor died doing it. A few survived to the verge of death when they were rescued by the advancing Soviet army.
I saw another sign yesterday that brought this to mind. It’s spray-painted on the side of a 30-foot storage container that sits on an otherwise vacant lot. This inscription reads “Vaccines = Slavery.”
It was scrawled by someone who apparently knows nothing about slavery — neither the slave labor of Nazi concentration camps, nor the chattel slavery of the antebellum American South. As for vaccines, rather than enslaving us, they’ve freed us from the sickness and death that went by names like smallpox and polio, diphtheria and tetanus, typhoid and cholera, rabies and rubella.
Vaccines are why once-common “childhood diseases” like measles and mumps no longer ravage American elementary school classrooms. It’s how Covid-19 could have been tamed had enough of us been willing to roll up our sleeves and take the shot.
We weren’t.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not equating anti-vaccinators and anti-maskers with Nazis. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was intellectually and morally comfortable blaming California wildfires on Jewish space lasers, eventually felt compelled to retreat from likening the House of Representatives mask mandate to the Third Reich law that required Jews to wear “gold stars.”
Congresswoman Greene’s anti-masking rant is, however, evidence of the error and habits of mind common among those who share her views. First, the stars weren’t gold, which makes them sound like awards American kindergartners might bring home. They were yellow and part of a multicolor Nazi badge system that identified your “crime” and marked you for persecution, prison camp, and ultimately death.
This seemingly small distinction is indicative of her willingness to speak when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Her misstatement of the HIPAA law to justify her secrecy about her own vaccination status offers a further example of the casual contempt for fact and truth she shares with her political allies.
Second, her statements are riddled with illogic. Even if you oppose vaccination and facemasks, there is no rational equivalence between requiring one segment of a group to wear a badge intended to punitively distinguish them from the rest of the group, as the Nazis did, and requiring every member of the group to wear the same “badge,” in this case a facemask intended to protect the whole group from illness, as Congress did.
Third, much of what she says is either deliberately inflammatory or insane. She has variously called for the execution of Nancy Pelosi, endorsed the existence of a video that purports to show Hillary Clinton cutting a child’s face off, falsely stated that Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar aren’t real congresswomen because they didn’t swear on a Bible, claimed that the Parkland shooting was faked, alleged that the Las Vegas shooting was perpetrated by opponents of the Second Amendment to frighten gun owners, and denied the existence of a “so-called plane” that struck the Pentagon on 9/11.
Our era’s scribes and hypocrites are culpable for leading us astray, but we bear responsibility for following them. When Tucker Carlson declares, “There’s no evidence that white supremacists were responsible for what happened on Jan. 6. That’s a lie,” he’s the actual liar. When he blames the Texas power outage on windmills, he’s lying. When he tells us “there actually was meaningful voter fraud” in Georgia, there wasn’t. And Dr. Fauci isn’t “the guy who created covid.”
I could go on, from Ingraham to DeSantis to Trump himself, but the tragedy is that most of you who refuse to take the vaccine or wear masks won’t change your minds except maybe on your deathbeds, or when you’re watching helplessly through glass as someone else dies.
You lay claim to your “individual liberty,” except freedom isn’t supposed to mean selfishness. I have no more right to endanger you or your children with my germs than I do by driving drunk in my car.
Neither do you.
If George Washington could inoculate the Continental Army against smallpox in 1777 and sign the nation’s first quarantine act in 1796, and if I could take the Salk vaccine in 1955, you’d think we could be vaccinated and wear facemasks for the sake of the public good in 2021. Yet only half of us are fully vaccinated against Covid-19. The seven states with the lowest vaccination rates account for half the new Covid cases and hospitalizations.
When the founders warned that the threat to our republic would come from within, they didn’t imagine we might literally kill ourselves and endanger our children to advance a political agenda. They were more concerned with what history taught them about the threat to freedom from political factions that put party above country and from a future tyrannical leader Washington described as “some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his country so much as his own ambitious views.”
They had no idea half of us would one day be too obsessed with opposing facemasks to oppose a tyrant.
Make no mistake. The Jan. 6 attack on Congress, and the illicit campaign leading up to it, was an attempt by a defeated president and his political allies to overturn a lawful election and thereby overthrow the government.
“Save America,” said Donald Trump.
“Stop the steal,” said Donald Trump.
“Fellas, I need 11,000 votes,” said Donald Trump.
“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
“Fight like hell.”
At Gettysburg, Mr. Lincoln told us our Civil War was testing whether a republic founded on freedom and equality could endure.
Now we’re the ones being tested.
History and our children wait for our answer.
I fear what our answer will be.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: A few words about the tyranny of facemasks.