Relapsing

NEVER, IN MY wildest imaginings, did I ever imagine that I would be hearing on the news about a measles outbreak all across the fruited plain of these United States in the year 2019. I would have expected all of that to be a relic of the past, especially since measles was pronounced dead and gone as long ago as the year two thousand. But here it is, again, hundreds of cases reported across half the country. Across America, during the past couple of decades, it has become common for parents to with hold vaccinations from their children, for fear of side effects rumored to be associated with vaccinations, side effects which are purely imaginary. Who knows how many thousands of children will suffer, and how many long vanished diseases will return in the coming months and years, all because of the anti-vaxxer insanity? I vividly recall my horrible bout with chicken pox when I was about three years old, and I have vague recollections of having had the mumps and measles, those infamous childhood diseases with which all baby boomers were afflicted, but which we had hoped to spare our posterity. All that was around 1960 or thereabouts. In the nineteen sixties, we believed that all diseases would be eradicated by or during the twenty first century, just like there would be colonies on the moon and Mars, hunger, poverty, and war would be eliminated, and so forth. In those days, we believed in science, and in our ability to make a better and brighter future. We never even wildly imagined that our grand children would be beset by the same demons which haunted our youth. But here we are, with no lunar or Martian colonies, rampant war and poverty, and diseases which should long ago have been eradicated from human kind returning from the dust bin of history, spreading, threatening to bring renewed plagues and epidemics. And all because of one simple, societal attitude; the widespread rejection of science by people who not only do not understand simple, basic science, but prefer to make no effort to do so, preferring stead to live in their own fantasy worlds where they, in their fear and ignorance, make and live according to whatever reality they conjure at any given moment. In this science fictiony year of the far future, we are confronted with a culture in which millions of people simply chose to reject scientific reality simply because it does not comport with their preferred imaginary world o choice. As many as one third of the American people deny climate change, even though the science proving it is surprisingly simple, and easy to understand. To accept climate change is to acknowledge the need for fundamental change, socially, economically, politically, which is anathema to the conservative mind set. just as many of the devoutly religious reject the fact of evolution because to accept it would question fundamental religious beliefs, so people reject climate change because it interferes with their political agenda. But why do people reject vaccinations? Because a popular attractive articulate sounding entertainer named jenny McCarthy, using bad science, popularized the notion that vaccinations cause horrible side effects, such as autism? Surely not. Widespread rejection of simple science due to unfounded fears, superstitions, or political agendas is something nobody could have predicted for the twenty first century. But it is a mental illness which could very well kill us all, if we do not find a cure for it. The cure, of course, is education.