A no-brainer for the greater good … just sayin’

Having spent a goodly amount of my early childhood laid up with one illness or another–including bouts of Measles, Chicken Pox, German Measles (Rubella), Mumps, not to mention continuous weeks and weeks of fever, swollen glands, strep throat, oh and a positive TB test that still means I need to get a chest X-ray every ten years or so–the notion that a few vaccinations could spare my blessedly healthy daughter weeks of that sort of misery was a no-brainer.

Okay. Perhaps there was a bit of a selfish motivation as well. Did I really want to sit up night after night nursing a highly contagious sick child who could “take a turn” and end up hospitalized or worse?

Reading the Little House On The Prairie series and the Betsy and Tacy books to my daughter reminded me of what the pre-vaccination/pre-antibiotic world was really like for small kids. In both series, siblings and friends of the main characters died rather uncerimoniously of Measles and Whooping Cough, Maleria or other infections, or spent part of their childhood in iron lungs or other contraptions to help limbs withered by Polio. Coming to those parts of the stories, I wanted to skip over them to spare my daughter the pain of what those losses meant in a much more precarious world than the privileged one of early 21st century America.

I didn’t though. I plowed through and explained that the world of those books was the world of places scattered throughout Asia, Africa and South America. Places where diseases, long controlled here and in other industrialized (post-industrialized) nations, represent mere glimmers of our collective past.

It puts me in mind that one of the negatives of privilege and its uglier cousin, entitlement, is the ability to forget that the niceties we all have access to are built on the work, toil and pain of others.

Sure. I can understand that for some people, such things as vaccination can bring about frightful consequences, but for those for whom it will not, don’t we owe it to those few who truly cannot take the risk to endure the “stick” and any momentary discomfort for ourselves and our kids?

And whether it’s measles today or some other forgotten horror tomorrow–maybe we should all have a bit of a group think about what it means to be a member of a community where we all pitch in for the greater good. Just sayin’.