By Landis Lain
Most of us have watched the news and read articles about folks who are vaccination and mask mandates. One woman calls it an apartheid type vaccination system; if one is vaccinated one receives certain privileges.
Forty-five, junior even piped up, “They’re imposing a caste system, a two-tiered system within our own country of American citizens.”
Another man opines that we are veering dangerously close to extermination language. Even my personal version of Bunny Ruckus, has chimed in with, “We have an administration that is reintroducing segregation again in this country under the guise of medical safety.” Last, but not least, Good old FOX News Commentator Tucker C. adds the footnote that “Medical Jim Crow has come to America. We still have water fountains. The unvaccinated would have separate ones.”
I have several questions for them. Who is we? Is that the ‘we’ who have lived hampered by discrimination and racism for hundreds of years? Or have not been provided with equal rights or equal access to medical treatment? Are they asking us not to trust our own government? Gasp!
The conservative privileged caste members don’t like it when they have to follow the rules made for everyone else to follow. Somehow that impedes their freedom to purposefully infect the rest of us with impunity. Colonizers and powerful American officials have done that on more than one occasion.
Accurate historical documentation teaches the lesson of the brutal genocide of the Native Americans. 19th century historian Francis Parker reported that the colonists gifted the Native people with blankets and linens contaminated with smallpox, which inflicted disfiguring scars, blindness and death. In 1763, colonizing armies were urged to “try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” From 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US government purposefully withheld treatment from syphilis-infected young Black men to study the effects of the disease progression. Moreover, the so-called father of modern gynecology performed medical experiments on enslaved Black women without anesthesia.
In 2020, a nurse reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forced unnecessary hysterectomies on women in a Georgia detention center. Most recently, the draconian laws recently imposed in Texas to limit women’s rights to private medical treatment, clearly show that medical freedom is not America’s truth.
The anti-mask-cination crew recognize discrimination when they see it. They see color and caste. They understand the racism and sexism they perpetuate. It is ironic that these privileged individuals feel oppressed by a mere mask or shot. Their screams of give me liberty or give me death are specious under the circumstances. They just do not like it when the rules are applied to them in a fair fashion. Folks should be able to die if they want to. They should not be able to take the rest of us with them. Go figure.
