Teach your parents well

Parents are teaching children that the vaccines are unsafe, indeed even diabolical

It’s an uneasy feeling to be in the southern United States today listening to the beautiful, close-harmony Crosby, Stills and Nash song, ‘Teach Your Children’, with its twangy and eerie ‘southern’ steel guitar riffs by the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia:

‘You, who are on the road / Must have a code / That you can live by….
Teach your children well / Their father’s hell / Did slowly go by.’

Uneasy, I say, because of what so many parents are teaching their children here, specifically about the Covid-19 vaccine. They’re not teaching their children well. They are teaching them that the vaccines are unsafe, indeed even diabolical. And they are teaching them that Covid vaccines are the product of a sinister conspiracy between pharmaceutical companies, the government, scientists and public health officials — and that therefore their children are prohibited from receiving the vaccine. The result is precisely that: although vaccines for adolescents aged 12-17 are cost-free, ridiculously plentiful and easy to come by, only 2% of children in that age group (compared to 40% or so of adults) have been vaccinated here!

Although part of the reason that I opted to visit the US was precisely in order to get my two children vaccinated, I have been bewildered to find that not a single one of their American friends has been permitted by their parents to get the jab. And what is particularly curious is how each of these kids have told me that they wished their parents would allow them to be vaccinated. This is a generational gap issue with potentially life-or-death consequences.

Yes I know we have our own problem of vaccine hesitancy in India, especially amongst rural populations (and blind followers of the likes of Baba Ramdev). But generally we characterise this hesitancy as deriving from ignorance — lack of education in general, or a cognitive inability to negotiate the sea of misinformation. What is striking about hesitancy in the southern US, however, is that it is rife across all socio-economic classes, all levels of education, and nearly all races and ethnicities — except, of course, Indian Americans, who are vaccinated at the highest percentages of all here.

The most widespread fear relates to the rushed development process of the vaccines, and the lack of data with respect to long-term effects. This is a perfectly rational concern, which then opens the door to rather specious speculation about potential infertility and other random fears. Far less rational is the widespread belief that vaccines contain tracking devices (engineered, some say, by the reptilian Bill Gates). The irony here is that many of those who give this conspiracy credence first learned of it on their location-tracking smartphones.

More germane, though, to vaccine hesitancy specific to the south, the so-called Bible Belt, are all the fears linked to religious belief or even in some way to the devil. Many ‘pro-life’ parents believe that the Covid vaccine was developed using fetal cells, and for these anti-abortion ideologues this is unconscionable. Although the belief is essentially false, this is a point where the generational gap becomes prominent: the vast majority of southern youth don’t even care about this issue; they are not vehemently opposed to abortion as their parents’ generation was.

A bizarrely quite widespread fear is that the Covid vaccine alters the recipient’s DNA. Southern fundamentalists regard this as ‘the mark of the Beast’ from the book of ‘Revelations’ in the Bible — you know, the one where all the plagues and calamities befall us and then the world ends. This may sound absurd to you. Well, it also sounds absurd to many of the children of the southern parents who believe it and thus prohibit their kids from vaccinating. Southern youth are not as fundamentalist as their parents’ generation.

Now, I am myself certainly cautious about government surveillance, the shenanigans of big pharma, and the ineptitude of public health officials, but there comes a time when a generation must relinquish some decision-making authority to the wisdom of their children.

It calls to mind how CSN changed the last verse from ‘teach your children well’ to ‘teach your parents well’:

‘And you / Of tender years / Can’t know the fears / That your elders grew by.

And so please help / Them with your youth / They seek the truth / Before they can die.

Teach your parents well / Their children’s hell / Will slowly go by.’