Why I Didn't Vaccinate, Why I Started & Why I'll Stop Again.
If the world were an overcrowded theater would that make it easier to understand?
I’m worried about the world. We’re looking for answers in all the wrong places. Maybe, click the little heart ❤️ now, in case you get to the end and hate me?
My core beliefs about life, medicine, science and death coalesce into a hobo stew of a handful of Eugenics, a splash of Christian Science’s reliance on spiritual healing, a spoonful of the Buddhist philosophy of nonattachment, another of indigenous cultures’ understanding of the connection of body & spirit, and a Jew’s reliance on miracles— simmering in a hearty stock of the deeply held conviction that
humans are no more important or entitled than any other sentient being
Some of my beliefs conflict with others of my beliefs. I’m complex like that, you’ll find no hobgoblins on me.1
I’ll name two of the root contributors to today’s problems. And how they relate to caring for Mom and myself, because I’m not even going to try to pretend I can solve the world’s problems—I can barely manage to keep my home from looking like a crime scene /a burglary gone wrong / the aftershocks of a thorough trouncing by cats, chickens, and overly sugared children (despite having no chickens or children, sugared or otherwise), but I can maybe explain my belief system and how it applies to us.
Finite Resources are, by definition, limited, because…finite. We can make small changes & hope they last longer, but we can’t make MORE.
But, we can control population growth. A reduction in population, with the same amount of resources = less/no overlap, allowing said resources time to renew and reup.
Recycling, composting, a movement towards more eco-sustainable products. Just a drop in the bucket because once we’ve created easier, faster and more convenient, you can’t put the cork back in that bottle.2 (Running the risk of a mixed metaphor, but shut-up, there’s a through line of liquid [drop/bottle] and that’s good enough for me)
I use disposable, never-going-to-biodegrade pull-ups for Mom, because cloth? Are you nuts? Who has the time? I’m part of the problem. I compost, recycle, upcycle, use public transportation and participate in my local Buy Nothing group, and pat myself on the back for all of it, but I’m still harmful to the planet because it’s more convenient for me.
Overpopulation: Aren’t we smarter than that?
We breed like freaking rabbits. When we were an agricultural society, we needed Ma & Pa to keep replenishing the work force, now it’s a habit. Plus pressure from the religious right, conservatives and media that assume we all want to be mothers and should feel badly if we don’t want that.
We’re acquisitive colonizers acting entitled to dominion over everything we see, and some things we can’t see (space travel, for example),
We’re subject to magical thinking3 and no thinking4 about the future. Most of us aren’t even aware there are such things as unintended consequences.
There are always unintended consequences.
Nutritional, medical and technological growth left unchecked or moderated*:
has each generation living longer (behold, the research on a process to reverse aging, because no one is really thinking…)
reduced infant mortality rates
has eliminated certain diseases that would’ve killed us or crippled us in previous centuries and generations.
has given us fertility drugs; IVF, surrogacy, also enforced childbirth; limited or denied access to birth control. This “have a baby, as many babies as you can” is an agenda they’re really pushing, hard.
*By unchecked & unmoderated I mean by thoughts of the future beyond self, beyond one generation, beyond what’s in it for me.
A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Analogy
Imagine a small off-Broadway theater that seats 200, but 600 people are currently crammed in there because children and even grandchildren were born there to the original 200. There’s people on top of each other, no personal space, fire exits & aisles are blocked, fights break out, they’re running out of popcorn & toilet paper, speaking of which the lines for the bathrooms are ridiculous and sooner or later, the toilets will overflow contaminating everything. More fights break out.
That’s us. That’s Earth.

Could This Have Been Avoided?
Just because we can live longer, doesn’t mean we deserve to, should or even that we’d be living better.
Just because you can reproduce doesn’t mean you have to.
Nature is a complicated system of checks and balances encompassing droughts, floods, disease and a predatory food chain. When resources are scarce, populations shrink to environmentally sustainable levels; when the environment improves, the herd grows. That’s the circle of life—up, down, around, repeat, like a David Attenborough doc of polar bears eating cute little baby seals. The world is harsh; the strong and clever live, the weak, slow and sickly, well, someone needs to be Soylent Green.5
Back in our imaginary theater as world, what if the theater manager had a time machine, rolling us back before medical & technological intervention gave us the ability to play fast & easy with the natural order of things, in other worlds, so that childbirth was limited according to the space and resources available? Instead of eliminating diseases, we let them do their job of culling the herd?
That was my thinking behind skipping vaccinations since my childhood vaccines. Before Covid and specifically Covid & Mom6, I got nothing. No flu vaccines, not Hep B vaccines (which I was told I needed, especially after the Hep C), not pneumonia. Nothing. Plagues and disease are nature’s way of keeping a balance; we’ve pushed through work arounds such as vaccines & medicine, but without thinking about the reverberations.
We’re reverberating ourselves right out of existence when act as if we’re masters of the universe, exempt from the laws and design of nature, when we expect to overcome, to win, to manage nature, when we fail to account for unintended consequences:
Real World Example: Female mosquitos bite & spread diseases such as malaria, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.
Nature’s solution: Sickle-cell anemia, an inherited disorder primarily in people with African heritage, makes you less susceptible to malaria. It’s an evolutionary, location specific, adaptation for survival.
Human interference: Bioengineered male mosquitos poison disease-spreading females during mating. Every action has multiple consequences—how’ll this poison hit birds, frogs, bats and turtles that feed on mosquitos? And the people that feed off frogs, birds, turtles.? Call me on two generations, it’s not going to be good.
We can win in the short-term, paving over paradise to put up a parking lot, but our industrial and technological development is far beyond our ethical, moral and spiritual capacity to manage those new tools.
We need to live with the limitations, not in spite of them.
Earth 2.0 on Mars or the moon is a billionaire’s fantasy. We need to reevaluate, slow our roll.
Living in Harmony with the World
Again, back in our little overcrowded theater, what if we allowed some, but not all medical intervention, translation: only basic medical needs met —pain relief and such, no lifesaving or heroic measures?
Simply put: One out, One in. Like managing a household clutter problem, nothing new comes in unless something old goes out. Balance.
Shorter lifespans & higher infant mortality sound cold-hearted but smaller populations keeping the herd manageable for the resources allocated, in this case, popcorn and toilet paper.
Our selfishness and short-sightedness is pushing our planet into a sort of epochal hibernation like a giant, spinning orbiting bear. While some version or metaphorical radical winter blankets the earth, we’ll die or kill each other and after a million or so years of hibernation, rest, and rejuvenation, Earth will get back into the serious business of being lush & habitable, without us.
Maybe, the next sentient grandmaster will stumble onto some real spiritual, moral and ethical development, listen to the spiritual leaders that rise up. Maybe next time. Maybe…
My mother has Alzheimer’s. This week’s New York Times: dementia cases in the US will double each year over the next 35 years to about one million annually by 2060. Over age 55?—I’m guessing just about everyone reading this is over 55— sorry to tell you, but you’ve got a 42% lifetime risk of developing dementia.
I blame all the things: medical science & technology, labor saving device, processed foods, and a capitalist and class system of haves and have nots.
Mostly, I blame the healthcare industry, for my mother’s Alzheimer’s.
At 65, she had a radical hysterectomy—pre-cancerous cells on her cervix, then six additional episodes of cancer in the next ten years. Two lumpectomies, a lymphadenectomy, three radiation treatment protocols, several surgical excisions, skin grafts and continued follow-up.
Terrific, they “cured” her cancers and she’s lived long enough to lose family, friends, a husband, a lover, her mind and memories; no longer able to make her own decisions, she’s completely reliant, alive with a life she never wanted. She’s the last one standing, or in her case, pushed around in a wheelchair. Thanks, science.
Had any of one of those cancers gone the distance, she’d have died before developing Alzheimer’s because the biggest factor in developing dementia? Old age. Mom’s generation didn’t worry about caring for parents with dementia—no one’s parents lived long enough.
We keep people alive longer, as if longer is intrinsically better.
Longer is quantity, what we’re not promising is quality.
What good is one without the other?
What if we spent less on medical research and more on fostering empathy, developing compassionate solutions? If we stressed education over acquisition, community over profit.
What if we understood life is short; a gift, not an entitlement.
- Life Extending Treatments
I don’t believe in life-extending medical treatments for myself or anyone I’m making decisions for. We’re not entitled to more and we’re out of room.
Diagnosed with Hepatitis C in the ‘90s they said, “without treatment you’ll die.” I freaked out, calmed down, researched and then refused treatment. Hep C was a consequence of the life I’d led. I accepted the consequences of my actions. I made some lifestyle changes, and today—over 20 years later—not dead yet.
Yet, when my gallbladder went rogue, I didn’t think twice about having it removed. Was it the pain? Or the fact that I was caring for Mom? That first excruciating gallbladder attack was the realization of my biggest fear—who will care for her if something happens to me? That was the sole reason I’d I finally relented and gotten Covid and flu vaccines, to make sure I was here to care for her.
If I wasn’t caring for her, when faced with the pain from my gallbladder, would I make the same decision I did years ago with Hep C? Let nature take its course? I don’t know.
In a world with limited real estate in all things, when I inhabit or use a certain amount of anything, there is that much less for someone else. I have no idea when my expiration date is, but using artificial means to push it off by years, weeks or even days, is simply playing god.
Not god. Don’t want to be. I have a hard enough time being me.
Click the little heart ❤️ then leave me a comment, I want to know what you think.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.… Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson
As if I’ve ever put a cork back in any bottle, as if I ever drank anything that had a proper cork, rather than a screw top, but I digress.
The belief that your ideas, thoughts, actions, words, or use of symbols can influence the course of events in the material world; presuming a causal link between one’s inner, personal experience and the external physical world.
“I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about it tomorrow.” ~ Scarlett O’Hara, Gone with the Wind
Published in 1966 as Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison the story takes place in 1999, opens with a quote from former President Eisenhower, “This Government has no, and will not as long as I am here have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with this problem of birth control. That's not our business.”
Really thought-provoking, Jodi. "Longer is quantity, what we’re not promising is quality.
What good is one without the other?" That's been much on my mind since my parents died.
I've long said that humane death kits should be delivered to us along with our Medicare cards. If we're suffering, if we're sick, if we're a burden to others, if we'd rather put our last few pennies toward supporting folks who are living actual lives than stewing in our own fetid juices and being spoon fed by strangers, we should have that option.