The idea of striking the lives of the non-vaccinated quickly gained ground, as if nothing had happened. A “health contribution”, a hefty fine charged to those who have not been vaccinated, a passport to allow simple internal movement: the leaders of the Quebec state seem to be boiling with a vain rage, which feeds on their own impotence. And we, who watch them become vindictive in this way, cannot help thinking that they are thus looking for an object to avenge themselves for their inefficiency.
The general idea retained with regard to the non-vaccinated is that they would be selfish. Yet I know some, like you perhaps, who would give their shirt to help their neighbour. But Prime Minister François Legault, an accountant by training, likes to format reality in the narrow dimensions of his Excel tables. He has a figure, that is enough for him: 10% of non-vaccinated people represent 50% of hospitalizations. This is the complexity of a pandemic reduced to an overly simple equation, which requires solutions of the same nature.
There is, of course, the rude unvaccinated, the intemperate militant, vociferating, belching, the one who flirts at all times with eccentric rantings, those of a populist right that fuels the worst reactionary outbursts. Perhaps we should ask ourselves how these rabid views, which have become ubiquitous by dint of being relayed and disseminated by garbage media, have become embedded in mentalities, often behind the convenient screen of supposed “common sense”, this dry fruit of rough-hewn minds. Should we punish individually what results in part from a continual collective carelessness in terms of information and education?
It is easy to scold a few “Ostrogoths” who have gone to do the party on the wings of a charter flight. Yet, isn’t this exactly the same type of social behavior, silly to cry, that has been applauded for years, week after week, in reality TV shows? Our world appears, in several respects, to have given itself the means of reproducing especially small spirits.
Personal development fanatics, like Jean-Jacques Crèvecœur, repeatedly plead arguments of the most preposterous unreason in an attempt to justify their frenzied opposition to the vaccine. What’s the use of evoking science against them since they knowingly choose to ignore it? The use of force against these “covidiots” is not likely to convince them to change their crusader attitude, but to radicalize them further. Are these people responsible on their own, as the government would have us believe, for a system that has been on the brink of collapse for years?
Among the unvaccinated are perhaps the most important group, that of the unhappy and hesitant. Homeless people, individuals who suffer from mental health problems, other cripples in society who have always suffered from a chronic lack of support. Will the Aboriginal peoples, refractory to vaccines, find themselves, once again, relegated to the status of foreigners in their own country? What about the thousands of elderly people, the undocumented, the sick, those isolated in the depths of the woods, the computer illiterate and all the crushed people of life? Their black pupils do not cease to dilate in front of the social evils of which they are suddenly accused.
That the French President, Emmanuel Macron, on the eve of an election where the extreme right in Zemmour is heating his buttocks, declares that he wants to “piss off” those who are recalcitrant to the vaccine is enough for him, on this side of the Atlantic, to be suggested to François Legault to follow this rather inopportune example, as if such an authoritarian drift was likely to materialize something other than an even more marked division of society. Is a globalized health problem only due to the vaccination of 100% of the recalcitrants of a national space?
Allow a step aside. At the end of the trial following the abuse suffered by the unfortunate girl from Granby, the crown attorney declared that it was a closed file, that this little victim could finally rest in peace. This reduced to the dimensions of a simple high-profile trial another glaring public health problem, that of child abuse. Child reporting rates continue to climb. And strictly coercive measures cannot change that. How many specialists pleaded the urgency, to finally remedy it, to ensure a better social support, to build affordable housing, to assure families of incomes other than miserable and a free quality education?
Can we ask ourselves how our health system is so weakened? Do we have to go back, to understand this, to the time when the Conservative Lucien Bouchard, blinded by his rantings about the zero deficit, sent home thousands of nurses, or even look, closer to us, at how Minister Gaétan Barrette been able to work with an ax in already vulnerable spaces? The system has been breaking apart for years, under the sneaky pressures of privatization. Is it by stigmatizing the non-vaccinated, by creating resentment, in other words by creating a diversion, that we will solve these problems?
To be together, to make society, supposes to tolerate that there cannot be unanimity. This turns out to be demanding, more demanding than contenting oneself with affirming to all comers one’s intentions to impose unity on the spot rather than giving oneself, for everyone, the means to create it in the long term.