I went looking for information on the Covid vaccine tonight and ended up on the WHO website.
Oh, okay, I thought – WHO is a reputable coalition of some really smart people, or so we’ve been made to believe,
so I felt confident I would get some reliable information.
However, even though my question to Google was “What is the Covid vaccine made of,” once I clicked on the WHO link, I was immediately greeted by a number of other links, one which advertised how to report people for “spreading misinformation.”
What? Frankly, this scares the hell out of me. There were links within links explaining how to report people on all the major social media sites and apps.
Ok, so these are the ways we communicate, all the social media sites and apps.
I worry that our freedom of speech is being threatened as government agencies encourage us to “report misinformation,” feeding the division and hatefulness in our country as we begin to suspect each other of malfeasance – even if that “malfeasance” is nothing more than someone spouting an opinion. When I was a child, I was told that this is how Communists undermine and eventually take over a civilization. They turn people into snitches who tattle on their neighbors or even their own family members, and as a result, in times past before “the fall of Communism,” people were dragged from their houses in the middle of the night and sent to Siberia, never to be seen or heard from again. I grew up in a military family and my parents were sure to teach me about TRUE patriotism, about the men and women who have died to defend my right to think what I want, believe what I want, and as long as my actions do not harm anyone else, my right to do what I want. Those real Patriots died so we could live freely as Anericans.
Okay, now back to the WHO and pushing people to report their fellow Americans (anybody remember the 1950s and McCarthyism?):
I realize nobody wants false information in these troubling times; we have a pandemic happening and it’s real and it’s killing people. But I have some genuine concerns about the vaccine, considering the rapidity with which it was created and given that it hasn’t been fully tested or proven fully safe. I feel like we are being asked to buy into it because, oh well, maybe it’s the lesser of two evils.
All this is my opinion, of course. For the moment, you’re free to disagree with me and I you. However, what if someone decides I’m telling people not to get the vaccine (im not saying that) or that I’m saying I will never get the vaccine (nope, not saying that either)…nevertheless, what if some well-meaning narc decides that in the name of patriotism and duty, they need to report this little rant of mine…ask yourselves, who are the purveyors of truth?
And who decides what we are allowed to say?
An expression of my own angst, fear, or worry about what the government is telling us we need to do, an expression of my own opinion, can be turned in as “spreading false information” and the next thing I know, my post or comment is taken down. Fascism, anyone?
In removing my posts, others are intentionally blinded to my thoughts as I am purposefully made dumb, my voice ripped from me as surely as if I were gagged, bound, and thrown in a back room or basement,
No one will hear me;
No one will see me;
Even though I scream at the top of my lungs…
Okay, so social media sites and apps are privately-owned, which means they can make their own rules about what we can say on them.
That’s fine but what happens when ALL means of communication are “privatized” – are we then effectually being stripped of our freedom of speech, little by little, one conversation at a time? One little ranty-post at a time?
Well, you say, you don’t have to communicate with others via those apps…
Yes, but the problem is, little by little, an increment at a time, the apps and sites are becoming the only ways we CAN communicate…
Sound like conspiracy-theory ridiculousness? Read (or re-read) Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
I leave you, as always, with a good verse for these troubled times in which we live: 2 Timothy 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
FroginthePot 