This is Ruby Red Apples, a newsletter about my thoughts on the world that is trying to be born.
This letter comes from a time where governments and corporations are taking unprecedented steps to coerce people, with each step an impossible increment on the previous. Previously surveillance capitalism, now a medical dictatorship1.
Previously the intrusion was “limited” to corporations watching you so that they could sell to you. Which felt pretty bad. It also felt like it could be rationalised away, that it had its own internal logic. After all, you’re using their software for “free”, with the price paid in date collected on you. It could be rationalised - rational lies.
This also felt like it had to be most anyone could intrude into your personal sphere. It would (surely) never come to forcible medical procedures or government coercion in the public sphere.
But, of course, it wasn’t the greatest intrusion, far from it. And of course, as we now know, the forced medical procedures followed. As did government coercion in public spaces. And perhaps there is worse to come. Probably, in fact. As the overwhelming response to each escalation is a bit of disquiet that is quickly pacified by the next escalation, and the next, and then the next.
This is not an intellectual game. Nor is it long into the future. A State Government announcement regarding sweeping mandatory vaccination two days ago. A conversation with my manager today. A good and decent man.
As we explored in our conversation, the vaccine mandate for the waste and recycling industry may leave me having to choose between taking the injection or leaving my 25 year long career. Not because he wants to get rid of me or even agrees with the mandate, but because he feels the company will have no choice. The company may be forced, through threat of hefty fines, to dismiss me if I do not take the injection by the deadline. And I will not take the injection.
It should not come to this. It should never come to this, for anyone. Nobody should be coerced into any medical procedure. I would feel the same even the injection promised only goodness. The right to determine what happens to my body is for myself only to decide.
However, this is no sad moment of despair. Rather, it is the sort of existential moment that brings extreme clarity.
So…this story begins at the point where I am confronted with the end of a world into which I have invested my career to date. And what better place to begin, because a world needs to end for a new world to be born. To use the metaphor of Charles Eisenstein, now is the time to push.
For every pressure brought down to bear from this world and myself can only push the new world closer to its birth.
It is the time to push.
So there you have it, I’ve declared my hand up front. I am pro-choice when it comes to the various injections doing the rounds for the current coronavirus. I happen to have faith in the ability of my body to resist contracting the disease, and if I do contract it, to fight it off. I also consider that the immunity developed through this process is far superior to anything that can be injected into me, enabling me to better protect those I love than anything else on offer. I even suspect that the virome is an important part of the human body’s development. More on these points later, but the upshot is that I choose not to take the injection.
I also honour those who have a different personal calculus, and have decided to be injected. Uncoerced, that is also an act of choice to be respected.