We've got a social contract to vaccinate our kids to save other kids from getting disease...
"So it seems to me that to withdraw our children from public education is to not play our (God-given) role as missional members of our society — like we can’t just choose to withhold our taxes. We give our children all those vaccinations when they’re young not necessarily to protect them from polio (since the chances of any one of my children getting it is exceedingly small) but because we live in a society, and part of the contract within the society is that we will never again let polio gain a foothold."
Out here, there is a sect of people who do not yet have cars. We were those people for a while when we first arrived... you make do. You take cabs, rely on the kindness of neighbors... you live. It happens.
I like to stop by the PX after hitting up the post office on my way home and have been known to give rides to people who are waiting on cabbies to show up at their station. According to whose social contract you look at, either I'm doing the right thing by helping out my fellow man who is without and I am with... this is good... but I'm keeping a cabbie from his livelihood. I'm keeping food off of his table and out of his kids' mouths. What is to be done with my social contract in that aspect?
I detest this notion of a social contract. I'm going to re-write mine and you tell me if you'll sign it. I will go for a "social contract" wherein I will do my part to raise my children to be good citizens, productive citizens, citizens who think, act, provide for themselves. Citizens who don't try to make their problems, other people's problems. I will raise my children to have morals, to treat people with kindness and respect... well... where it is due. I will teach them to call a moron a moron and to not fall in lock step with myrmidons. I will teach them that you give respect and allow people to lose it, not the popular notion of the opposite polarity that people don't have your respect until they earn it.
I will try to show them we can be acceptant of foreign ideas, foreign people, foreign ways of life. I will show them at least a modicum of flexibility, patience, grace, selflessness, adventure, passion... all things which are not in a curriculum, but are fundamental to life.
I will teach them to question their government, question their friends, question the military, question the church, and yes, to an acceptable degree, question their parents (though I encourage tact), find their own truths, find their own paths.
THESE are the tenets of my "social contract" with you. I will choose to, or not, vaccinate my children. If you want your child free of an illness, vaccinate him. I'm not sticking a live agent, one with known ill-effects, into my 3YO for your kid's benefit... it's for her's. I have enough trouble not crying with her by convincing myself that this might one day keep her alive without some lib-social-contract ballyhoo about her saving some other kid from her.
This is not being taught in school. You can't teach it inside those walls. You can't teach it with a bureaucracy. You certainly can't teach it from a union.
Aargh. I'm just going to end this post.
1 comment:
Well said.
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