Vaccine hesitancy has been on my mind for at least 3 months – or at least since I received my Moderna jabs in March and April of this year. One article that caught my attention was back in June where NPR had an opinion piece on vaccine hesitancy (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1011043667/how-privilege-plays-a-role-in-americas-vaccine-hesitancy). The key word here for me was privilege – yes a kind of descriptive noun that we often confuse with the right to have, own or posses something.
We have, in the United States, forgotten all about the privilege the citizenship of our county has afforded us – we seem unable to distinguish between the two. Right is available to all citizens while privilege is granted. Think of it in these terms: the word “right” standing on its owns is used in our Constitution to designate a right that one can assert affirmatively and which the government is precluded from invading. Privilege on the other hand, is best referred to as a right that is conditioned. Something that we learned from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who writing as a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1892 said of the freedom of speech of public employees: ” The petitioner may have the constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”
A vast number of our citizenry have conflated their right to determine what is good for them, with the privilege of hesitancy which imposes undue restrictions on the public and common good as well as public morality. Walking on a crowded Ocean City, MD boardwalk the other week, I noted with apprehension a number of t-shirts perpetuating anti-vaccination, and it struck me how simple it is to disregard one’s public duty and morality on account of privilege and make one’s anti-vaccination stand an abject moral and intellectual failure while at the same time, impose upon the society views that are not for the common good of the public.
Let’s have some fun with this for a moment! I used to smoke and that was my privilege, but it was not my right to smoke in a crowded room of a doctor’s office, non-smoking designated airliner cabin or my office inside the suite of offices of the company I worked for. I smoked outside, or I waited until I was out of the closed quarter confinement and exercised my privilege without public nuisance or arbitrary imposition of my privilege on those around me. When I became a non-smoker, I did not, at any time become an anti-smoking policeman that imposed his right to object to smoking to those whose privilege was still allowing them to puff away. I simply want to ask us to reject someone’s privilege to object to something that is for the common good of the public and society and not have them police the policy that helps us be better. There should be no privilege associated with vaccine hesitancy.
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