The Virus that Keeps on Giving: The Rite of Passage

Vaccination presented Wokeism with a rite of passage. Only through that lens can the vaccination campaigns and the dehumanization of the unvaxed make sense.

The American Spirit Essays #31

(continued from The Sacred Garb)

Membership has its Privileges

While face masks are a classic religious artifact, the Covid vax became a rite of passage. All decent people got themselves vaccinated at the earliest possible moment. Parents rushed to get their children vaccinated as soon as they were legally permitted to do so. Those with children deemed too young pleaded with the authorities to lower the age limit. They cheered every story of a pharmaceutical company announcing plans to secure legal permission. They tripped over each other to be the first to inject their young children with an experimental serum, conferring no conceivable medical benefit, for a disease that posed zero statistical risk to healthy children.

In a more rational moment these parents would have balked. Adoption was highest among elite helicopter parents, the sort that pore over ingredient lists to ensure that no unapproved preservatives enter their children’s systems. Elite parents who research and compete and evaluate and monitor every aspect of their children’s environment were the first to submit their children for medical experimentation.

Once again, their behavior seemed to border on the insane. Insanity, however, should always be the conclusion of last resort. Certainly, some of these parents acted out of terror. Others did it to conform with their Woke neighborhoods, communities, and private schools. Most, however, did it because they recognized the vaccine as the precondition for full entry into the Woke flock—much like baptism for Christians, a bris for Jews, or any of the countless rites of passage that have arisen in nearly every tribe, faith, nation, or culture that history has ever recorded.

The Woke leadership sought to enforce their new rites with a coercive conversion far more intrusive, and with even weaker rationale, than mandatory masking. In fact, the greater the accumulated data suggesting that the vaccines were far less protective than originally thought, the harsher their coercion. New York City’s very Woke Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced the country’s first municipal vaccine passport requirement shortly after scientific data established that innocent bystanders could become infected with Covid from the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated. As news of the vaccine’s shortcomings mounted, the campaigns became increasingly hateful.

The vitriol America’s Woke elite—from the Biden White House on down—heaped upon the unvaccinated was unprecedented. It may have been the first time in American history that the country’s leadership sought to turn a majority of its citizens against a despised minority. Widespread discriminatory laws came into play for the first time since the end of Jim Crow. Serious, prominent people advocated excommunication and the withholding of basic medical services—penalties that have never been seriously considered for smokers, the morbidly obese, helmetless motorcyclists, extreme athletes, or any of the other Americans whose personal choices make them likelier than average to require medical care.