February 2011 Archives

Spring spatters, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Oh, how we used to laugh at the generations that came before us, falling for these ridiculous patent medicines and cure-alls. How could they have been so simple? Who would believe that going to Dr. Vines for his Vegetable Concoction would be the way to treat cancer?

Well, our forebears should be laughing at us, because we have vastly increased scientific knowledge, incredible medicines, and a couple of centuries of know-better, and yet now is the Golden Age of Charlatanism. Thousands of people are choosing to endanger their children and society because a blond bimbo believes that vaccines cause autism. People who know absolutely nothing of how many people used to die from food poisoning are characterizing government as jackbooted thuggery because it wants to ensure that milk is pasteurized. People are at once convinced that pesticides cause every cancer under the sun and that DDT should be brought back to deal with bedbugs.

When I was growing up in the Space Age, science and knowledge were revered. We believed in advancing knowledge using the scientific method, and improving our world as a result. Now, through a bizarre combination of "question authority" (reinterpreted as "always doubt authority"), religion-based blinders and a popular and political culture that is proud of idiocy, we are turning progress on its head, rejecting solutions our somewhat more sane forebears would have killed for, and believing that the desire and belief of the individual now completely overrides the needs of society. I really can't figure out how we got from there to here, how we have embraced both an absolute lack of personal responsibility, where someone else must be at fault for everything that happens to us, and an absolute right to having each personal opinion indulged. But I do know that here -- a place where people think that it's their own personal choice to have or not have diphtheria or mumps or measles, and if we have a few deadly outbreaks, what's the big deal? -- is not a place I want to be.

Laugh if you will at the folks of days gone by who might have tried Dr. Vines's C.C.C elixir -- but they didn't have any better options. We do. Let's stop choosing to be stupid.