Christmas visits are complicated this year. People who feel safe under vaccine mandates want that feeling in their personal lives, too. Guests used to ask “Can I bring a dessert?” Now they say “We just want to be safe—can you confirm that all your guests have had their boosters?”
There will always be those who recommend disowning family, but for the rest of us who actually want to love people unlike ourselves, holiday feasts are gifts. I’m thankful to my wife for hosting several gatherings this year, and I’m thankful to those who invited us into their homes. We are cherishing Christmas.
“I don’t want selfish people at my party,” announced one discriminating host.
That got me thinking about the ubiquitous use of the word selfish to describe the more than ¼ of our friends and relatives who haven’t received any covid-19 vaccines.
Can we stop using that word? It’s the wrong term.
Selfish is an easy fallback to describe behavior we don’t understand. The environmentalists blocking traffic, the pro-lifer praying in front of the clinic, the actor using her awards speech to pontificate on Palestine, the homeschooling mom, anyone who steps outside our everyday patterns and might suggest something uncomfortable—it’s tempting to tag such people as selfish. I suppose anyone standing apart from a crowd indirectly calls attention to himself.
But they’re not selfish, not really—it’s the wrong word. The environmentalists who expect to be arrested as they stand precariously in the intersection, like the homeschooling mom who expends a great deal of time, money, and effort to educate her children, aren’t elevating themselves. In fact they’re exposing themselves to risk and ridicule, restricting and undermining their personal well-being, in order to elevate some principle they hold to be greater than themselves.
It’s the same with the one out of four friends and family who are inaccurately labeled the unvaccinated. How do they express their selfishness? They…
surrender their jobs and health insurance
are arrested and imprisoned in many countries, sometimes even in America
are renounced by the less tolerant among their friends and family
give up their social activities and recreation as institutions enforce passport-only access
relinquish their right to speak in the public square, especially online
suffer every imaginable insult to their intelligence: they are told they disregard science, they’re manipulated by conservative media, they’re gullible enough to believe in conspiracy theories and witch-doctors and horse medicine, and on and on.
Would selfish people really choose all this suffering, or would they put their own convenience first?
I’ve behaved selfishly. I know what selfishness feels like, charging for the last seat on the train or steering my wife away from the musical and towards the action movie. Losing my job over a vaccine-tracking database feels different. When I talk to people who haven’t received one of the covid-19 vaccines—or who, like me, have refused altogether to participate in the vast new information networks tracking their social risk—these people don’t sound selfish.
And frankly it’s just hard, as a vaccine-passport-carrying majority are systematically isolating a minority, to apply the word selfish to the minority. I suppose an oppressive majority can be made up of altruistic, magnanimous people while a victimized minority can be made up of selfish people. But it’s hard to imagine. Historical examples from the Salem trials to the Jacobins, from the Cultural Revolution to the Hutus, go the other way. History often ends up describing those majorities with words like hysteria and zealots and terror, but it never seems to describe the minorities as selfish.
So call us non-conformists, certainly. Call us stubborn, sure, for holding out all this time. Call us cynical for failing to applaud proof-of-covid-19-vaccination, even after every form of media, from Twitter to Fox, has promoted it. Call us paranoid if you must, for imagining there could be harm in a world in which a president alone—without any legislation, without any approval by elected representatives—can declare crises as he likes and demand that every citizen and private business not only comply, but also punish and report dissidents.
Call us any of these. But don’t call us selfish. We’re not.
The Selfish Unvaccinated
Ive tried to write a comment 2x and it kicks me off…..thank you Michael for your courage and words that are so heartfelt and truthful and really makes me feel that I too have made the right decision.