I recently came across an article about an American teacher who had been strenuously protesting a mandate requiring vaccination or weekly COVID testing. Essentially, she argued that her healthcare is her business. During a pandemic. Turns out, however, she’d been vaccinated long before the mandate and was simply attempting to assert her ‘right’ to refuse to confirm her status. After all the bluster (and weeks of media appearances), when the time came to stand behind her principles and go on unpaid leave, she produced the card.

I found her statement on the matter particularly interesting:

“I didn’t want to have to produce a vaccination card because I don’t think that’s legal or appropriate, but if you ask me to choose between my personal beliefs and my students, my students will win,” Koen said. “My mother said that I was a round peg in a round hole (at Southeast) and I do well with kids there and that’s where I belong. I know I make a difference there. I can’t imagine my life not teaching.”

Kadence Koen

Leaving aside the question of whether this level of wrongheadedness shouldn’t automatically raise questions about her fitness for molding young minds, it reminded me of a conversation I’ve been having on and off with friends for the past few weeks. I’ve been wondering how and why, in a world so full of inequity and corruption, this issue has come to be the hill that so many people seem to want to die on. Literally, in some cases.

Intellectually, I understand that the battle here is simply a fight for control. Regardless of whatever fiction we tell ourselves to get through the day, most of us have precious little control over our lives. Existence in the kind of hypercapitalist system in which so many of us find ourselves trapped revolves around money. The vast majority of us don’t have enough to live comfortably and those who do are generally very focused on always having enough to do so. Those that have more than enough, more than they could ever need… well.

Most of us spend our days on a hamster wheel focused on survival. We’re beholden to our jobs so we can provide for ourselves and our loved ones, we’re beholden to various systems that don’t have our best interests at heart, we’re beholden to whatever ideas of ‘success’ we’ve internalised from society at large.

Technically, we could step off the hamster wheel at any time, but the cost of doing so is ridiculously high, particularly when it’s an individual action and collective action is a tricky proposition when most of us are focused on our own survival.

Suddenly, we find ourselves in a situation that forces the whole world to pause and makes it abundantly clear how pointless the whole hamster wheel thing has always been. One might argue that we could have taken this opportunity to imagine a world that makes sense and begin building it, but given that most of us were barely surviving before the pandemic brought the global economy to a near standstill, it’s unrealistic to expect a worldwide collaborative shift towards sense as entire livelihoods went up in smoke. This is particularly true given the vast gulf between those who had to put themselves at risk in order to earn a living and those who were able to shift to working from home (and the lack of empathy from the latter towards the former).

Of course, the push for a return to normalcy began almost immediately and only ramped up after vaccines became available. As if normalcy was so great to begin with. People who were being squeezed before the pandemic and were only squeezed harder after it might be feeling heavily pressured to take a jab so we can get back to a normal that was only marginally better than this one.

In this context, I can understand why some might decide to rebel with the final bit of power they have left: personal bodily autonomy.

What I don’t understand is why this specific bodily autonomy hill is the one they’d choose to die on.

In a world where women’s bodies are widely considered public property and our reproductive choices are everyone’s but our own? In a world where we are expected to work ourselves to the point of exhaustion (if not death) in the name of a #hustle culture that is just thinly-veiled encouragement to maximise someone else’s profits? In a world in which a place calls itself ‘First World’ while its citizens aren’t even entitled to healthcare and only abolished slavery up to the point at which it locks people in cages?

THIS is the point at which we’re fed up and ready to assert ownership over ourselves?

Even as we’re surrounded by a virus that disproportionately affects those with the least money (and therefore power) because they’re less likely to be as healthy and have access to the same level of healthcare?

Seems strange.

It also seems like a conspiracy theorist’s dream. Instead of 5G and tracking chips, what if the goal is simply to get enough people vaccinated to keep the economy running while everyone else can fight up with whatever hand COVID deals them? After all, as anti-vaxxers love to point out, COVID isn’t deadly to everyone. Similarly, not everyone has to be concerned when the ICUs overflow, just those who can’t afford access to exclusive, top-tier healthcare.

We already know that some of the loudest agitators made sure to get that jab. It turns out they had all the belly to climb the hill but they for damned sure don’t plan to die on it.

So why would anyone else?