Anti-Vaxxers: Powerlessness and the Power of Narratives (Op-Ed)
How much power do we really have?
As people living in the present moment, it can be hard to shake the sense that something unspoken has been lost to us. Maybe this loss took place silently generations ago, and we are merely existing in its aftermath. Thanks to the ongoing pandemic, it feels more than ever that we are living through a wake, sifting through the wreckage of what we are told was once a workable society.
This mode of thinking could be seen as one-dimensional and pessimistic. Right or wrong, however, it’s an easy way to look at the world. It’s easy because it makes for a great narrative.
For Americans who are anti-vax and anti-mask, narratives are important. With the surge of COVID-19’s delta variant, the vaccine and those who refuse it have been the subject of renewed debate and media scrutiny. People have tried to explain the reasoning behind anti-vax beliefs, which have little to do with facts and almost everything to do with narratives. Take, for example, the issue of mask-wearing. To anti-vaxxers, the mask is important less for its practical reality than its figurative meaning--it covers the mouths of those who wear it, “silencing” them and taking away their individuality. In truth, speaking while wearing a mask is effective and painless. It can be easy to forget you’re even wearing it. But this truth doesn’t take away from the mask’s symbolic power. The image of “sheep” wearing oppressive, government-mandated masks continues to be weaponized because it fits a common narrative.
That narrative goes something like this: COVID was overblown (or manufactured or fabricated) by wealthy “globalists” such as Bill Gates and George Soros to exercise control over an increasingly docile population with vaccinations and further their own power. Therefore, people who choose to be vaccinated are blindly choosing security over freedom. To conspiracy-driven anti-vaxxers, those who refuse the vaccine are the only members of society who have a hope of maintaining their freedom or humanity in the future. If this is true, we are at a crossroads, and receiving the COVID vaccine means accepting a dystopian reality.
Of course, this isn’t true for many, many reasons. But if you think in terms of a narrative, these conspiracies are interesting because of how much agency they give to individuals who reject the vaccine. Anti-vaxxers are essentially the protagonists of these narratives, capable of preventing, or at the very least opting out of, a frightening new world order. So while the villains of the anti-vax story are sinister, there’s a certain optimism in their ability to be thwarted. Like in many good stories, the conflict all comes down to one binary decision: get the vaccine or don’t. But real life isn’t a story, and this moment in history is not the crossroads. Or at least it’s not the only crossroads; there have been many in the past, many of which we likely didn’t notice.
Some anti-vaxxers claim that COVID was initially used to weaken and destabilize the economy. Does that explain how, as of April, the collective wealth of the nation’s top billionaires increased from 3.4 to 4.6 trillion during COVID-19? Is COVID responsible for the minimum wage remaining stagnant at $7.25 since 2009 despite rising inflation rates?
Anti-vaxxers often say that our rights have been taken away and we’re no longer able to make our own decisions about the issues that matter. But since the beginning of the 21st century, two presidents have been elected to office despite having lost the popular vote, a sad fact which has nothing to do with COVID.
There have been fears that the vaccine could contain a microchip or tracking devices. But what of our phones and the cameras in our computers and our social security numbers and the cameras that surround us? Are we not already being tracked and monitored as members of a post-9/11 surveillance state? If vaccine policies have been used to suppress us, then what does that say of military drones and increasingly weaponized police forces? Why would a COVID vaccine be needed to make us weak or docile when the food that we buy from supermarkets or the plastic bottles we drink from or the myriad other vaccines that have existed for decades could do just as well?
It didn’t take a virus to make the air we breathe unsafe.
Everyday, people face economic scarcity and job insecurity, and general dehumanization. Getting paid for something that you love is hard. Feeling like you control your own destiny is hard. Finding a connection to the natural world even as it degrades is hard. Combating injustice is hard. Living a life of substance is hard. Being happy is hard.
Not getting vaccinated is easy.
Anti-Vax conspiracies are filled with secret motivations and complicated schemes, but the irony is that they present a version of the world that is simple and streamlined. If choosing not to receive a vaccine was the most important step in defying the evils and indignities of the world, life would be more manageable. It would require less effort. A world in which cabals and secret societies prey on our collective ignorance is easier to grapple with than our shared reality.
In that reality, making a positive change involves self-reflection and hard work that will not pay off in your lifetime. It involves standing up for yourself as a worker and as a consumer and as a human being who inhabits the planet. It’s painful and it may never be enough.
We are not powerless. We can find our power in small pieces and use it for good, but doing so is often uncomfortable and mundane. It does not come with a set of instructions, but an important first step is rejecting simplistic, Young-Adult-Dystopian-Novel explanations of the world. Only then can a new, more truthful narrative emerge.
