All through the ages, intolerance, discrimination and persecution have been driven by two factors. One is fear. The other is a sense of unquestioned superiority – moral superiority and superiority in numbers. Both of these preconditions are now fully activated.
This week we received a Letter to the Editor from a Sechelt gentleman directed towards “protesters and vaccine holdouts,” reminding them that they “chose to be second-class citizens,” a term formerly reserved for convicted criminals.
“You are now a facilitator of sickness and death, the 21st century equivalent of the plague-spreading rats responsible for the Black Death of the 14th century,” he wrote.
His text file was titled “21st century rats.”
A Gibsons reader copied us on a letter he sent to MP Patrick Weiler, calling for unvaccinated people to be denied passage on BC Ferries because “I am very uncomfortable with having to travel at close quarters with them on the passenger deck of a 40-year-old ferry.” The unvaccinated are already banned from air and rail travel, so the same rule should apply to ferries, he argued, perhaps not realizing (or caring) that without the option of driving, such a ban would turn the Sunshine Coast into a penal colony for those affected.
Another Gibsons man wants the unvaccinated to be somehow identified “so that I can exercise my right to stay at least a kilometre from them.”
The unvaccinated are going to hell, according to one reader who put his thoughts in verse: “God is very busy now because of people like you./You will suffer your ignorance when at heaven’s gate, you’ll not pass through!”
Diseased vermin, dangerous offenders, the evil damned – what a nice way to perceive thousands of your neighbours. And ignorant – they are universally put down as idiots.
At the paper we have received many emails and a few phone calls from the holdouts and they generally come across as at least average in intelligence. Some are still questioning, others are firm in their views. One of their common themes is that a healthy person’s risk of getting sick from COVID has been so blown out of proportion that it’s made people completely irrational with fear. On the other hand, they do not agree that the mRNA vaccine is proven safe, or that it’s very effective, and maintain that in the long run it could do more harm than good to the body’s immune system. There is also a small minority of doctors and scientists who share these positions. They are dissidents and are ignored by the media, but they are out there and have drawn their own conclusions. If people are willing to lose their livelihoods and social standing over this, they must feel strongly about it.
Call them wrong and misinformed, but the demonization is getting out of hand and classic signs are showing of toxic intolerance towards a despised minority group in our midst.
One thing we’ve learned since the spring of 2020 is that we are most definitely not all in this together. But let’s not destroy our community over our very human differences.
