WAITING TO HESITATE
Saturday, October 24, 2020
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. – Helen Keller
When there is a safe COVID-19 vaccine, will you vaccinate?
Aside from ‘who should get vaccinated first, second … last, etc.?’ there is another consideration: whether you get vaccinated as quickly as possible, receive it with confidence and trust – or will you be waiting, hesitating?
Plain-vanilla questions; not so effortless to answer.
I’ve been inviting comments without consensus – admissions, having not considered those issues much. I’ve found that interesting, revealing we are mostly fixated on here, the now, weathering this storm, without much regard to what comes next.
Maybe we’re still recovering from rapid-collective changes of recent months, some form of PTSD reaction, and aren’t seeing far beyond today and tomorrow.
Well, don’t worry, there is no need to fret about those issues right away.
Because we handle risk really well. Better than we might think …
One of the most significant risks we take is walking out from behind a parked without looking. Yet, from the time we teach that caution to our children, we don’t worry about it much, and neither do they – because we take for granted our acceptance of risk that comes with knowing how to be careful. Few things are safe, guaranteed, or risk-free. That’s really not new. In most matters, we learn or calculate the risks – and we take those risks and buy insurance for insurable ones …
Thanks to science, we can get cures, vaccines, or treatments that improve health and save lives, and thanks to drive-safely campaigns and good signage, and better-engineered cars, we have fewer car crashes and fewer fatalities. And, on a side note, due to COVID-19, people are driving less, and accidents have declined, but enough about the business challenges of body shop owners, let’s turn our thinking back to life-risks.
I don’t think it’s an exact parallel, but we all know what a computer virus is – and we don’t want to catch one.
So what do we do?
We buy up-to-date computers equipped with software tools of anti-virus, anti-malware, and programs that regularly scan for, quarantine, and remove bad things – all the while knowing there are brilliant scientists relentlessly seeking new ways to penetrate our computers to install their latest virus by exploiting our vulnerability. The wiz-kids at Microsoft and all the other big computer companies are working full-tilt on trying to patch and eradicate those ‘oops’ things while building the newest fastest whiz-bang perfect machine and software to better insulate us from the world. And still, somebody will open something on their computer which sends some new bad thing to our computers as an innocent-looking email that originates (we think) from a friend or trusted organization we do business with (i.e., our bank or credit card company, stores we know, or our governments) – and with a click of a button, bang, we’ve been infected.
What comes next?
Sure we want safety, but that’s not the world we live in – we live lives of everyday risk all day. Getting colds, stomach flu, or unexplained illnesses used to be expected, little concern to most of us – just part of work, school, air travel, and any gathering.
Life may be adventurous self-discovery, but lately, we’ve become emotional tortoises, wanting to safely grow very old inside our shells – seeing life, not through rose-tinted lenses, but through the petri-dish we are all swimming in, among all things floating in the air – as we always have, breathing air and everything sweet, sour, and foul contamination floating around.
Safety is a delusion. Relative safety is relative. And our view changes each time a balloon of belief gets popped – and we learn to live with something, or live with the risk of it. It’s like kissing a girl who has mono, herpes, and bad breath all at the same time – undisclosed, of course, because you thought ‘tic tac, the pill and a condom’ saved you from all potential perils.
The most dangerous experience in life might be the innocent-looking first date!
I know, I know – maybe better to risk getting COVID, a computer virus, and herpes …
P.S: And, when do we stop wearing masks?