I’m guessing you’ve already seen this story in the news, but on the off chance you haven’t, there was a very disturbing incident in Los Angeles a short time ago. According to the media reports I’ve seen, a combined group of anti-vaccine activists and right-wing militants (most of them Trump supporters of the most Deplorable sort) briefly shut down an anti-Covid vaccination site. They blockaded it and confronted the long lines of (mostly elderly) people who were waiting for their vaccines.
The Most Dangerous Among Us
Eventually, the protestors left the area, once they were confronted by the police. Apparently, though, there were no arrests — which angers me, because I think there should have been. But, be that as it may.
What is terrifying about this incident, though, is three things. In no particular order, they are:
1) The most irrational and dangerous groups among us — Right Wing Insurrectionists, Anti-Vaxx militants — are beginning to coalesce into one mad whole, holding the same lunatic opinions, or somehow merging them. Thus Q-Anon, the stolen election, “vaccines cause autism,” and, “Jewish Space Lasers” are gradually forming a single gelatinous mass of insanity and fury.
2) These groups have more or less openly now embraced a creed of forced conversion. It isn’t enough that they, themselves, don’t get vaccines. Now, they will require you not to do so as well. In other words, they repeat the “libertarian” screed, “I’ll do what I want” but then add the coda, “and you will, too.”
3) And, finally, if it wasn’t clear from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol building, it is now obvious that confrontation and intimidation and even murder are part and parcel of their strategy. From there, it is an easy step to mass violence, and I fear that we shall see them take it sooner or later.
I hope that I am wrong and these people will gradually fade from view as time goes on. But I fear that they may not. And if that’s the case, we need to be very, very careful of them.
For you see, their minds are occupied by imaginary monsters.
Which, alas, by their own fury…they might make…
All too real.
*
Until next time…
Onward and upward.
~mjt