Righteous Anger

Why we're still not over it, and why that's the point

I know it seems like us unvaxxed people won't let it go. But vindication, it turns out, comes with a certain amount of righteous anger for me. People wanted us to die. To never see our family again. To be cut off. Arrested. Etc. I remember.

And I know some will balk at those examples, but that's not an over exaggeration. It was our actual lived experience. And thanks to this Rasmussen poll, commissioned by the Heartland Institute, 1,016 likely voters, in January of 22, we have a record of just how far they were willing to go.

○ 59% favored confining unvaccinated Americans to their homes, no exceptions except emergencies.

○ 48% wanted the power to fine or imprison anyone who publicly questioned vaccine efficacy, on social media, on TV, anywhere. Forty-five percent supported "temporarily" housing the unvaccinated in designated facilities.

○ 29% were fine with removing children from unvaccinated parents.

Please, place yourself back there. These weren't crazy, anonymous posts in the weird corners of the internet. These are the stated preferences of our family, our neighbors and our friends, gathered in a professional poll, only 3 years ago.

Do you remember? I do.

I remember what it felt like to live inside that environment. Knowing that people I once loved and respected thought so horribly of me. I remember how every conversation carried an undertone.

At one point, as I have written before, my husband even asked me, after one particularly contentious visit with my Dad with me warning him against the shots, if I would rather be right or have a relationship with my father. I chose the relationship. And then a few short years later, I lost him anyway after he took every single jab.

I remember how every workplace policy update or scheduled town hall for my husband included anxiety. He had already lost a position and had to seek new employment in 2020. Now here we were, worried if they would continue to allow exemptions, or was it time to sell the house and get out of here?

The fear of prosecution, persecution and worse hung over our actual heads for literal years. Biden's “Dark Winter” came, just not the way he predicted it.

So when someone tells me to let it go, to stop bringing up 2020 and the years that followed, I want to ask them what exactly they think "letting go" looks like for a person who watched 59% of one party's voters endorse house arrest for me, my family and for other people like me. Anger isn't the opposite of healing. Sometimes it's the first honest thing you feel once the fear finally has room to leave.

I'm not writing this to fight masks or mandates again. I'm writing it because history has a way of being rewritten by the loudest people and the shiniest narratives and not the truth the moment it stops being convenient.

The poll existed.

The numbers were real.

The people who held those views mostly moved on without ever reckoning with what they were willing to support.

Someone has to keep saying it out loud, on the record, so the next time this happens to a different group of people, nobody gets to pretend it came out of nowhere.

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Thank you to everyone who has stuck around through all of it. The platform changes, the shadowbans, the friends who quietly unfollowed. You're the reason I keep writing this stuff down instead of just muttering it to my plants and pets.

If you're not subscribed yet, now's a good time.

There's more where this came from.