An open letter to the 10%…..and an invitation to join me for a drink on the other side.

An open letter to the 10%

Because you aren’t fringe dwellers, you certainly aren’t stupid and at the moment I can see how angry and frightened you are. Mostly angry- because that’s how frightened shows up when we don’t call it for what it is.

You’ve been backed into a corner that you’re raging against the legitimacy of, and I’m about to be forced by the government to refuse to serve you a drink at the wine bar we are just about to open at WorkLife in Berry. And that frightens me.

I also love you, respect you, and miss being at ease in your company.

I’m not worried that you will give me covid (I’m vaccinated, after that it’s a lottery) — I’m worried about how your increasingly hardening view is changing my view of the sort of person you are. And I’m worried that the latest greatest moral challenge of your time has been so effective at diverting your attention from the real ones.

Previously I would have glibly cheered on a pandemic of the electively unvaccinated- natural selection at its best! But I can’t now- because that includes the vulnerable, the ignorant, the marginalised, most of the third world and you. And I love, care for, and worry about you all.

I am kept awake late at night (writing things like this) and fretting about how to help you out of the rabbit hole you’ve dug for yourself. At various levels of extremity on the cautious, skeptic, conspiracist scale- you’re my closest neighbours, my beloved childhood friend, my husbands’ mates effervescent wife. You’re my teenage boyfriend, you’re my much missed surf coach, you’re an admired chiropractor, or the counsellor and massage therapist in my little village, you’re the cool young mum at school, you’re my close family members.

And like it or not, agree with it or not- it’s about to get real. In less than a month you’ve got three impossible, but exclusively pragmatic choices

1) Climb down from your strongly principled position and get vaccinated

2) Forge yourself a fake vaccination certificate

3) Take a break from society as you remember it until this moment passes

Most of you are going to find a morally circuitous path to taking option 2- and the government knows it and doesn’t care- otherwise they would have enhanced the security features.

Those who are scared of the risk of the vaccine will come around. At some point the fear of ‘taking part in a medical experiment’ will become acceptance of the worlds most comprehensively real-time tested, semi-effective and highly monitored harm minimisation intervention ever.

Almost none of you will end up taking the break from society as you know it that you are threatening to.

And that’s where it gets interesting to me. What choice will the 10% make? How can we help wake them up from their fevered dream, rebuild their trust in facts and institutions? And will you really ask me to look past your doctored PDF certificate to serve you a drink?

That’s where my curious brain starts thinking about what’s really at play here and what will help bring you back.

I worry about how a mass decline in trust in institutions and facts actually undermines democracy, civility and freedom far more efficiently than a public health order or an rushed vaccine ever could.

I worry about how these last two years of stress and hibernation have effectively taken our collective eye off the ball of the actual moral challenge of our time- rampant inequality and a rapidly warming climate- both cause and effect of runaway individualism.

Most of the 10% that are currently sweating over vaccine mandates used to spend their evenings worrying about how to help people and our climate. Who wins when the eternal fringe of the 2% of the population who will always mistrust science and society blooms to 10% and then 25%?

Whether we get to 70/80/90 or 95% vaccinated will actually tell us how much of our society we have to reconnect with the stabailising and civilising power of facts, science, trust, individual sacrifice and collective action.

That’s why I do care about engaging with the 10% of you- my friends, community and family who are against vaccines and have in the last few weeks been aggressively ousted by impending mandates.

Here’s my conspiracy. Here’s why I care about why you’re angry and why I will patiently, kindly and without judgement wait to walk alongside you on the road back to reason, sense and selflessness.

The question I ask, and the research that occupies me, is what subterranean force is really at work when the activists join up with the wellness warriors, the conspiracists, the hyper-rich individuallists and the uber-conservative christians in expending all their energies uniting in the dark side of the web on anti-vaccination campaigns?

I’ll tell you who. It’s the fossil fuel producers. The authoritarian governments. The climate change deniers. The planet-raping mega rich. The pyramid schemers. Our tech overlords. The quack-cure peddlers. The cult leaders. The nihilists.

I can’t wait to get back to the main game where you- the 10% who count yourselves as independent thinkers, with big hearts and brave souls climb back out of the foreign and toxic rabbit holes that have claimed you. There on the edge I will wait for you as you find your way back into the light.

When you wake up to this madness that has befallen you and recognise your false new allegiances, I’ll be there waiting patiently with a ladder and a hug before I serve you a wine at my new bar.

And then together we can get back to the real work.