Senile vs Juvenile ft a Weight-Lifting Kennedy

I am a humanist at heart, and at the start of 2020 was well-advanced in the process of becoming a liberal. I live in one of the wealthiest nations history has known, in a level of material comfort unimaginable even to my grandparents. AI is coming - soon, humanity will be obliged to work less, and we will have more wealth. It seems Jerusalem is nearing. In fifty years, we ought to have enough food, technology, and medicine that no one will have to want for anything, and humanity can turn its focus back on itself. The arts will flourish, we will use our time to find healing and significance, families will be families once more, the life of the spirit will came blazing forth; we will live in a second Golden Age.

So I thought, and so, deep down, I continue to think. But I have had been forced to revise my vision of how this will come to pass. Until 2020, I thought we could prompt, or at least encourage, each other to build a more humane world. But then COVID happened, and I saw what prompting and encouragement look like in practice.

I will not go into too much detail. It will suffice for me to say that I was never vaccinated against COVID, because all along, from the evidence I saw, it was apparent to me that my being vaccinated would not protect other people, and it would be more dangerous to myself (or at least riskier) to be vaccinated than not. So much was obvious; a simple reading of the scientific literature showed it, and time has proven my conclusions correct. And yet, at the time, there was a vast concatenation of pressure on me to do something which I considered wrong. The media was telling me I must, my friends were telling me I ought, the government banned me from eating in restaurants, crossing borders, and visiting friends. If I had not been self-employed, I have little doubt I would have lost my job. Australians were locked like battery chickens in their cages; people had to wear masks, despite no evidence being proffered by anybody that masks helped in any way with anything other than the spread of dread; for weeks at a time we were not allowed outside, despite the fact that the virus barely spread in outdoor settings; we were fined, threatened, terrified, forced to stand 2m apart because some weasel in Washington picked that number out of a hat. I know of people who committed suicide. I have a friend who got a vaccine he felt obliged to get, and spent six months in hospital. Health reports were repressed and denied, then later, when no one was paying attention, reluctantly released, heavily redacted. I still feel angry about how the world’s governments reacted to a disease little deadlier than a flu; I cannot fathom their reasons unless I assume the worst about people I would feel more comfortable assuming the best of.

In 2021, I visited a cousin for Christmas. He is a doctor who owns his own practice. At the time I was still uncertain about whether I ought to be vaccinated, so I asked him his opinion. He said he was administering the vaccine. I asked why. The first reason he gave me was that the government was paying him $7 per vaccine. I was sincerely shocked, but perhaps I played it up. He was offended, and said he had to put his children through school. Certainly that is true, and I consider my cousin a decent man, but a doctor assumes responsibility for the health and life of other people. He is trusted by them. He cannot treat his profession like accountancy: he cannot simply do what he is told; he must do what is right. A life is not a tax return. There is a much higher moral burden on a doctor, and I think if you are unwilling to carry such a burden then it would be better for you to be an actuary. I am aware my standards are high, and I understand that the data at the time was anything but clear, but I also think we fudge with ourselves when we put other considerations ahead of our own integrity. We come into this world with a soul and leave with a soul only; anything we collect along the way is insignificant by comparison.

I believe my cousin administered the COVID vaccine to children. The facts, on that issue at least, are clear. A German study indicates that three children per million died of COVID, and found no children under the age of 5 who died. Meanwhile, a Hong Kong study indicates that 373 per million boys (1 in 2700) between the ages of 12 and 17 developed myocarditis after receiving the COVID vaccine. The data seems to indicate that, the younger the vaccine recipient, the higher their chance of developing myocarditis. According to pre-COVID data, somewhere between 25% and 50% of people who contract myocarditis will die within ten years. And myocarditis is just one of many injuries reported from COVID vaccines. Most injuries sustained were neurological. Data indicates that children were thirty times more likely to die from the COVID vaccine than they were from unvaccinated COVID. And yet we jabbed these defenceless little people willy-nilly, so that my cousin’s children (who survive, thank God) may one day pick through piles of their peers’ corpses on the way to their slightly-more-prestigious-than-otherwise schools.

Sometimes, perhaps, we might ask ourselves how we would have behaved in Nazi Germany. Would we have gone along with the atrocities? Would we have known, in our hearts, that the events transpiring around us would one day be considered atrocities? Would we have had the discernment? Would we have had the courage? Would we have had the kindness? It seems clear, from evidence tendered between 2020 and 2022, that we are no more noble a people than Germans in 1937. We have no moral high ground to preach from. An awful thing happened in that place at that time; if it happened again now, we would fall prey to it just the same.

In investing money, I have come to learn that the single most important thing to look for is good people. Warren Buffett says he looks for “integrity, intelligence, and energy; without the first, the other two will kill you.” If this is true of companies, how much truer must it be of nations? And yet the mightiest nation in the world faces an election in which one of the two leading candidates is a doddering mess who goes to war every time someone in the next room sneezes, while the other candidate is a wounded child intent on nothing grander than making as many people admire him as possible. I wouldn’t trust Donald Trump with my lunch money: I am confident he would consider himself more entitled to it than I am. I wouldn’t trust Joe Biden with my lunch money, either: he would probably forget I had given it to him at all, or else buy his son a burrito.

There is one candidate, though, whom I do admire. Robert Kennedy Jr spent his career litigating against General Electric for polluting the Hudson River, against Ford for dumping toxic waste on tribal lands of the Ramapough Mountain Tribe in New Jersey, against DuPont for zinc contamination, against Monsanto on behalf of people suffering from Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma caused by glyophosphates in the herbicide Roundup, against a city council that wanted to build a garbage processing facility in a poor urban neighbourhood in New York, against the City of New York, which wanted to convert a community park in the Bronx into a police firing range, and many others. These is not easy work to take on, especially when, by token of his name and education, he could have secured just about any cushy well-paid job in the nation. He has lived a harder life than was required of him; I suspect his reasons for that have been moral. I listen to him speak, and I hear integrity. I hear a man who had some sort of spiritual awakening at some point in his life, and has lived a moral life as a result of it. No doubt he has done things wrong; but I see in him someone who feels the need to do good, and doesn’t just pretend to it. He has received an awful lot of criticism for his views on vaccination, but I, having listened to those views, tend to agree with them. He does not deny the benefits of vaccination, but complains of the laxity of their testing, the low legal standards pharmaceutical corporations are held to, given the history those corporations have of deceiving whomever they can on their way to a profit. Since the year 2000, the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the United States have been fined, cumulatively, in excess of 114 billion dollars. We are all old enough to remember the Oxycontin crisis. The pharmaceutical industry could well be considered a criminal enterprise; I can hardly consider the call for closer and fairer regulation of such companies cynical.

If today were 1937 and we were in Germany, it is easy to imagine Joe Biden proudly and blindly heading the bureaucracy of the coming atrocity. Trump would either swan off to Switzerland, or stay behind to buy depressed assets. I have faith that Robert Kennedy Jr, at least, would stand up for what he considers right. Perhaps my faith is misplaced, and no doubt there are other things than simple moral courage to consider when electing the President of a nation; but for now I have faith in the man, and I pray he upholds it.

Donald Trump
Tibor Mozes (via pixabay)
Donald Trump, Politician, America