Nobody wants to kill their own children. Â I mean, that may seem like a good solution at tantrum time, but all kidding aside parents for the most part really want to see their children survive them.
However, the desire to feel good about protecting your children can lead down a path where feelings outweigh reasoned arguments. Â Thanks to my friend Eric for sending me this great article on one facet of the crisis in this country concerning the irrational, wish-dream advocates attack on all intellectual and rational pursuits.
This article at Wired (“An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All”) does a good job of summing up the current information about immunization and the alarming trend to ignore the body of science supporting it. Â Definitely a good read.
What is interesting to me (and to a number of friends with whom I have discussed it) is this willful embrace of ignorance. Â It’s not just present here in this immunization issue. Â Anytime truth comes into conflict with emotion there will arise a faction who cling to untruth for the sake of the heart-strings.
While I am certainly capable of sympathy with those many positions which feeling leads us towards, an important part of growing up is recognizing that the world is rarely as we wish it.
It’s time to grow up, everybody.
Though it is likely true what this article posits in its final paragraph: “There will always be more illogic and confusion than science can fend off.” Â Nonetheless, we can and should raise our rational voices against the gale of emotive blabbering.
It is no longer enough to rest assured that the truth will prevail in time. Â Yes, the Catholic Church did finally pardon Galileo. Â But he died blind and separated from his daughters under house arrest in Rome.
Raise up your rational voices.
