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If You Could Sacrifice Your Own Vaccine….
My eldest finished off her second dose of the vaccine today (she was wildly excited despite hating shots). My youngest is still too young (although she turns 12 this summer)- a fact that does not escape my mind when I see so many people disregarding children’s health now that they, themselves, have the option to take off their masks or socialize more.
So my question today is this:
If you could sacrifice your own vaccine dose for a child you do not know, would you have?
Or, since I just started watching Sweet Tooth on Netflix (based on a book)…
If you knew that staying alive on this earth would come at the detriment of someone else, would you choose death instead?
I say the latter question because, while watching this show [that is moving art in terms of it’s cinematography and visual whimsy], I keep getting angry at a character who knows a “cure” for her comes at the risk of children most unlike her (vaguely a different species, but still part human)… yet she continues to want to stay alive. Each episode I find myself yelling: “I would say no! I would choose to die, rather than have someone else die so I can live.”
But then I thought: Am I alone in this thought? Is this character supposed to be relatable? Because, to me, she’s not. She’s almost sort of a villain, as I’m watching… but I can tell that is not the intent of the show-makers, and that it’s meant to feel much more grey.
Thoughts? Feelings? Big questions for a Wednesday!
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2 Replies
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I hate this question so much, hah! Here are my thoughts, although I might not be able to give a solid answer right now.
If I were able to sacrifice my own vaccine dose, I might. Sure. Especially if I knew that child were high-risk or in a situation where they needed it more. I know you said “a child you don’t know” so I wouldn’t be aware of their situation, but let’s go ahead and say “sure” to this one.
Would I continue living if it came at the detriment of someone else? Yeesh. If I were not a mother, this would be much easier. I’d willingly sacrifice myself for the sake of another. But since I am a mother, and me being gone would certainly be a detriment to my daughter, it’s a lot more difficult for me to say that. I would love to say that I would always do the selfless thing, but I truly don’t know (and will hopefully never encounter a situation like the one you described).
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Yes, we can think about questions like these, but we can’t answer them in advance. We would only know what to do when we would actually be in the situation which the question describes. Because the actual situation is real and very alive, providing us with many clues and pointers about the answer, while the question and the thinking is abstract and bereft of aliveness. The real situation triggers our intuition, the thinking does not.
Actually, in February our personal phisician called and offered us an early vaccination. We declined for many reasons, one of which was that we thought others might be needing the vaccine more than we did at that time, for instance because they had a risky job and could not isolate themselves as well as we could. The answer came intuitively and easy in real time, while talking on the phone. We had no regrets, even if this meant that we are still in isolation until the second half of July.
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