It’s thrown about now as a response to any argument, any disagreement, or when someone shows valid concern or personal dislike for things or concepts. You are ANTI-something, is the response. Which seems rather lazy as a first thought, to give no thought whatsoever to why they do not, but rather just focus on the fact they do not. But let’s look at Anti and what it represents. I thought it meant to be against something, vehemently. Like in the past we have had people being Anti-war and Anti-establishment pushing back, and on the flipside there would be the Pro people, the ones pushing for the action. And in the middle, the majority it seems who aren’t much of either, because although the problem is understood, taking sides and pushing any agenda usually leads to competition and ego, often losing sight of the problem or moral dilemma being presented. It becomes about wanting to win and be the one who can say they were right, not about doing what is right.

So to the ones who want everything to be black and white, it suits a purpose for people to be either herded or placed into the Anti or Pro camp. The for and against, a crafty and efficient form of division. You are one or the other, you must decide! Or at least that is how it is painted. Using opinions and feelings, and occasionally facts to further their side, which isn’t content on just being, it seems to need to eliminate the other side. As the film Highlander put it, ‘There can be only one’. But there isn’t, there are many. In between the scale of for and against, there are those who are undecided, or who have leanings towards both arguments so they do not ‘take sides’ or commit to a position. I understand why these people are referred to sometimes as ‘on the fence’. But look at it like this, if you were on the fence in between two enclosures, and one has crocodiles in it, and the other some hippos and you are being given a choice of being in either one, or staying where you are for now, suddenly that fence doesn’t seem so ‘indecisive’ does it. But that’s me personally, because when I have been told I am on the fence about something, I don’t believe it’s because I am indecisive on a subject. I think it is because I have looked at all the information being presented, how it is being presented and what it is trying to achieve, and if it doesn’t quite stack up. I will wait. For more information, or to see what happens to then take a course of action. I call that patience, others may call it indecision or see it as a non-action, as others will always perceive things differently to you, even if it seems like are on the same page, or saying the same things. They will have had a different thought process to get there, and as we know, just because we are talking the same language doesn’t always mean we understand what each other is saying.

We have had the pro and anti-abortion laws debated fiercely in American states, whipping up a frenzy of divide there over the decades, as well as their gun laws and segregation laws of the last century. It seems they were the most split country, for and against, red and blue, north and south. But we do have the same here in the UK, just further along perhaps, and for different issues. Having a class system changes the playing field a bit, or at least it did. But in the last few years, we have a new kid on the block to enter the arena. Well, I say new, because until recently it was believed that it was a mostly new argument of yay or nay. Being Pro Vax or Anti Vax. And it is only after you look into that argument, you can see it is certainly not new by any means, and in fact has been with us as long as said vaccines. It was by virtue of belief we have been lining up for decades already and handing over our health systems to the state, belief that everyone had just been doing the same for the longest time. And as the argument goes ‘they have saved millions of lives’, and on the face of it yes, they have. If you look a little deeper into the entire history of them, then you may change your view slightly. But we will go with the belief that it is true, they did work as told and were there to help people to avoid tragic and debilitating illnesses and even death.

However, within those decades and times, it would appear that not everyone carried that belief with them, but the ones who are most interesting in this, are those were who for them, and then changed their mind after first-hand experience of one. And when you start to pull at that thread, It all starts to unravel. Many people over the years have tried to speak up about harms and issues, concerns and things that often get swept aside, ignored or covered up. And I know people cite this point a lot to go with medical harms, but that’s because it is so important, Thalidomide. Now, it may well be that they ‘didn’t know’ before they distributed the drug and actively encouraged pregnant women to take it. But the concept that it took them five years to notice something wasn’t right and take it off the market is the hard one to understand. Unless you see it that the whole episode was another of their ‘trials’ they like to run on populations. Some of those other experiments that have been run covered in my article An experiment, but a big one. To not notice something like that, where it wasn’t before, and the only new thing introduced is ignored extensively. I sometimes wonder about hearing that the prosthetics industry boomed after WWI, after using lots of injured and disfigured soldiers as subjects – painted as though the industry grew to be there after the fact. I wonder now, did they decide on the next industry as they do, and then need test subjects and customers to roll it out to, as has been done time and time again. And it may seem like a tangent, but my cynical mind wondered if they decided they needed to move into prosthetics for children, but you can’t just send them war to cripple them, and they already had experiments underway for children taken from orphanages and care homes. They probably required these children to be in the community, as this needed to be seen by people and they wanted to see how it played out in a ‘normal setting’. The ‘Zika outbreak’ in South America has a few markings of something similar, but it’s hard to tell at this stage.

But those things are very visible, and it couldn’t be hidden for too long that something tragic had occurred, but they tried. Now, it seems further along a bit in the enterprise of medicine, a few people started to report some not so visible differences happening. Then some more, and so on. But not enough for it to cause concern amongst those who make money from it. And not noticeable enough that people couldn’t function, just affected in some manner. Reminding me of reading Brave New World, where they explain how to create the lower levels of society, by hampering their brain development in the growing process, to slow down their cognitive abilities so that they can still perform menial tasks and function, but cannot think beyond their status as it were. And although it may have been a fictional setting for that story, I did take it out of that context and thought about what process you might use if you wanted to achieve the same result. You cannot grow them in pods as they did in the book (although that’s coming apparently so get ready – Pod life 2), so you would need a way to get to the child in the womb, or shortly out of it, and during their childhood to create and maintain what you are after. Flooding communities with alcohol and drugs is a start, followed by bad nutrition and a different education standard. But medicine it seems may have been a rather crafty cover for quite some time to be very intimately involved with communities and people’s lives, and has been a global operation for over a century. And this is where the Anti argument has reared its ugly head and taken centre stage.

But really isn’t as clear cut as it may seem, because many who are ‘Anti Vax’ as they call it on this issue, didn’t start that way. In fact, I know very few people who throughout my life have even said a bad word against them, quite the contrary, as with myself. I have extolled the virtues of medical science many times in the past, seeing the patterns they wanted me to see and thinking no further. Taking it all at face value, until there was reason to think a little harder and start to dig a little deeper. But many didn’t, and followed their belief that it was for their good. So, there’s no way they could be anti, right? They went along with it all and did as they were told and when they raised concerns suddenly they were the ‘other side’. Well, that’s the twist isn’t it, that it’s not there to represent you being on one side of an argument at all. It appears to be there to shut down and discredit there being an argument or debate on it at all, which in itself becomes very telling. If someone gets bitten by a dog, and is then weary or scared of dogs, people don’t have a go at that person and start calling them anti-dog. Often they will appreciate that it can happen, and it doesn’t mean you should be afraid of all dogs but a fear of it thereafter can seem logical. However, in that example it also needs to be understood, all dogs have the potential to bite, so being wary of something that can cause harm is very logical. And we take steps in all aspects of our life to minimise risk, and to assess situations for safety and if they pose a threat to us. From animal, human and plant alike. So, medicine should be treated no differently to those other three when it comes to knowing your environment and surroundings and what we put into our body. A risk assessment of sorts should be employed at all times, but with animal and plant there is only a certain angle to think of it from, they aren’t psychologically calculated, or money motivated. So, when it comes to people being involved there is an extra level of thought you should give to that assessment, because you never really know what is motivating a person…

(c) K Wicks