Jab This, Eric Peters

To all those who regard me and other people who have chosen not be injected as “selfish” or “stupid” or “reckless”:

Get therapy.

I am not sick. I have never been sick, this entire time (so much for “highly contagious” sickness) notwithstanding never once “practicing” any of your bizarre sickness-dissipation rituals, such as obsessively washing your hands, obsessively avoiding other people and walking around with your face effaced and looking like the scrotal sack of a European beach Guido. 

At what point do your fears and assertions – that I might get sick, that I might spread sickness – take a back seat to the fact that I am not and have not? What gives you the right to impose on me because you are afraid?

Maybe I am afraid you might be a mugger – if you’re black – and by dint of that, forbid you from entering my store.

Like that much? It’s based on the same derangement; on the same irrational fear, sweepingly applied to individual people who’ve done nothing to cause you the slightest harm.

Do you have sex? I worry you might have – or could possibly spread – a dangerous sexually transmitted disease. You could be a risk to others!

I demand you prove to my satisfaction that you are “safe” – as by getting regularly tested for STDs and producing papers establishing your state of sexual health. But you are healthy and responsible about your sexual activities? How can I be sure? You might be spreading AIDs or herpes or some other sickness.

Does my fear obliged you to accommodate it?

Can you see where hysteria such as this leads? Or rather, how it has no end? Aren’t you sick of it, yet? 

Do you want to live in a society that says whenever others are afraid of something it obliges you to submit to whatever remedy they say is necessary to calm them?

I am “selfish.” How so? I want nothing from you – the person who is demanding I submit myself to your injunctions. The person who demands everything, from me – including that I surrender my body to be experimented upon, so as to make you “feel safe.”

While I defend your right to sovereignty over your own body.

You insist I assume known and serious  actual risks for the sake of your perceived benefit, even in the objective absence of any such. 

And I am the one being “selfish” . . .