Millie LaFontaine lives in Concord.
Children are expert at their lessons. They learn and build on lessons every day, at school and at home. Adults should do even better, shouldn’t they?
Why do we adults never learn? We seem to willfully embrace ignorance over truth, and baseless claims over proven evidence.
Two different issues are front and center this week — the ongoing pandemic and the latest tragic school shooting. To me, they both persist because of willful ignorance and stubborn refusals to look at facts by the adults in the room.
By all rights, the pandemic should be in the rearview mirror by now. Instead, we have reached yet another tragic milestone, a million deaths in the U.S., and the virus hasn’t gone away. Yet we behave as if we’re completely done with the threat of COVID.
Our careless disregard for each other’s health allows the virus to mutate and become more contagious and possibly more deadly. Thanks to our obstinate disregard for the facts, the end is nowhere in sight.
Mitigation measures are out there. Why do anti-maskers claim that masks don’t work, when scientists and epidemiologists have learned that they actually help considerably? Are they willfully ignorant or are those who have set themselves up as their go-to sources of information actually feeding them disinformation?
And why are individual “rights” so much more important than the public good? We have yet to learn that lesson.
Why do anti-vaxxers resist the opportunity to boost their immune response to a deadly virus, when there is incontrovertible evidence that vaccines save lives? It’s not even a question of the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know.
The “devil you know,” that is, the possible adverse effects of vaccination, are vanishingly rare compared to the “devil you don’t know,” the very real and far more common risks of contracting COVID and developing severe disease or dying or developing “long COVID”, an illness characterized by a multitude of chronic symptoms
I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But it seems that, once people have committed the anti-vax message to heart, no amount of evidence will change their minds.
We adults find endless ways to avoid learning our lessons. This week we are reeling from another mass school shooting. It’s hard not to conclude that we are determined to find ways to allow harm to our loved ones, again and again and again.
I remember where I was when I heard the news of the senseless massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. I was positive that every American and every political leader would get to work to ensure nothing like that would happen ever again.
Here we are, nearly 10 years later, with countless similar mass murders of innocent schoolchildren occurring in the interim, more than two dozen just this year, and we are wringing our hands, seemingly clueless on how to stop the violence.
Our politicians pray piously and lament loudly over the tragic loss of life, but do nothing. The legislation on the books is basically unchanged from 10 years ago, some states, including our own, even worse than others.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is poised to loosen, not tighten, gun restrictions. And the powerful gun lobby whips current and would-be gun owners into a frenzy. How terrible to be deprived of the eighteenth-century “right” to bear arms, to be limited in any way from easily obtaining and openly carrying guns, including assault weapons, wherever they please.
Why haven’t we researched gun violence more? Research leads to solutions. For instance, seatbelts are now mandatory because the research done by the Centers for Disease Control provided incontrovertible evidence that they save lives. Well, it turns out the CDC’s efforts to understand gun violence have been muzzled by the gun lobby, which clearly prefers ignorance over truth.
We need to understand how to prevent these tragedies. We need to learn the signs leading up to violent acts. We need to be able to identify potential shooters. And we need legislation to keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm those we hold dear.
We need to answer for our own times whether individual rights are more important, or the common good. We cannot keep closing our eyes and pretending this will all go away on its own. We need to learn our lessons.