Nobody Asked Me But: Lesser of two evils beats hot conspiracy theories

That’s it. That’s enough. I’ve had just about enough of this. If I hear one more person tell me what a fraud all this masking, social distancing, vaccination and public health mandating is, I am seriously going to toss my cookies all over anybody not standing six feet away from me.

There’s no avoiding them, these anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. They deny the numbers of fellow human beings who have been stricken by the pandemic, or pooh-pooh the severity of the virus, or even shrug off fatality rates by claiming that the casualties were health compromised already and would have died from some other cause anyway.

They mistrust the mainstream media and surround themselves with misinformation and disinformation easily gleaned off the world wide web where one fake news item is cited by another one and then commandeered by another until it seems that it must be true because why else would it be popping up everywhere?

They believe that they are the ones who are doing all the critical thinking. Anybody else, and that includes the vast majority of doctors, nurses and other health professionals, are being duped and led by the nose by those who want to restrict the rights of members of the public to make decisions about their own bodies. That’s right. They see themselves as true rebels. Revolutionary heroes. Fighting the battle for truth and freedom. Let the masses line up like masked sheep waiting to get jabbed by Big Pharma.

I must have missed something. When did saving the world from a runaway deadly virus become an issue of personal freedom? This virus, which is now in its fourth wave and has mutated a number of times to increase its rate of infection, has now accounted for a death toll of more than 4.55 million lives worldwide and nearly two thousand in British Columbia.

Whatever happened to looking out for the common good? Have we reached the point where we’re willing to endanger the lives of others to make a point out of not allowing others to tell us how to behave? If we live in one great global village, then I must be the global village idiot because I just don’t get it. How has this unholy alliance of far-right conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and libertarian bloggers come about?

During World War II, when the German Luftwaffe flew bombing raids over the cities of England, did Londoners decide they were going to disobey the blackout orders and leave their house lights blazing because nobody had a right to tell them how to act? If you feel like driving on the left side of the road for a change, is that okay? The same goes for seat belts, motorcycle helmets and selling cigarettes to minors.

Sometimes circumstances force us to choose the lesser of two evils. Nobody enjoys having to slap on an ill-fitting mask just to enjoy a cup of java at the local café. How many of us can hardly wait for that next needle in the upper arm? Do any of us really want to pull out our proof of vaccination card if we want to go out for a family dinner or catch a hockey game?

The answer is no. Nobody. Certainly not our anti-vaxxers. They’re onto the great conspiracy which aims to suppress the human race by surreptitiously stripping away our rights one by one until we all become virtual slaves to the system.

What conspiracy are we talking about? There are so many to choose from. Just round up the usual suspects. Over here we have an array of Communists, left-leaning Socialists and Jewish people who are plotting to overthrow our “free world” democracies. By getting us to surrender our individual rights, they are paving a path towards totalitarianism and dictatorship where the state has complete control over the individual.

Over there stand the industrialists and billionaire bankers who throttle worker rights in order to perpetuate a capitalist society. In this conspiracy, Bill Gates and his cronies have manufactured a psychology of fear that can only be quelled by the injection of a dangerous or bogus (depending on which theory you believe) magic elixir vaccine whose only guarantee is that it will earn them trillions of dollars.

Just around the corner lies another conspiracy of aliens from a distant galaxy, terminator robots from the future and undead zombies trying to weaken our human race by altering our DNA so we can easily be conquerred.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. Throw in vaccination conspiracies by the Chinese government, 5G technology, the World Health Organization, Dr. Fauci, the Illuminati secret society, Brexit, the Freemasons, the Knights Templar and Walmart, and you get the idea that there can’t be too much going on globally because everybody is too busy trying to trick the world’s population into getting poked by the vaccine.

One conspiracy theory gaining popularity is that the injections are actually planting microchips in our bodies so the authorities can pin-point our location at any moment and in this way will be able to control us better (as if they couldn’t do this already by tracing the movements of our cell phones).

What I don’t understand is how the anti-vaxxers have convinced themselves that governments all over the globe are conspiring to put aside their ideological differences in order to impose the vaccine on the world’s population. Think about it. When have all the rulers of this planet ever, EVER, agreed on anything unanimously? What has made them have this sudden change of heart? Perhaps the aliens from a distant galaxy theory isn’t so far off.

Nobody asked me, but isn’t it time we took a good hard look at ourselves. Maybe I’m wrong and herd immunity is just around the corner. Maybe this so-called plague from hell will fade like a whimper, as will all of our fears as they did with Y2K. But if I’m not wrong, each of us has a responsibility to one another, our children and those who come after us. Don’t blow it.