Quote:
Originally Posted by John Mercier
It isn't political.
Eisenhower happened to be Republican... but was an introvert focused on the collective well being rather than the individual.
I noted him because ''Make America Great Again'' is really a plagiarism of Ronald Reagan's ''Let's Make America Great Again''... which was speaking of the Eisenhower/Kennedy years. The Eisenhower era being the original ''when America was great'' was largely due to the collective mindset of general well being that infused the American population.
Bringing it back to the issue... the collective mindset of that time was so strong that it was rare to find someone that had not been inoculated against small pox. Even though small pox was not spreading like wildfire throughout the US, was not transmitted by respiration, and the US didn't have a confirmed active case of it after 1949... the inoculations when on until 1970. The small pox vaccine had to be renewed every ten years, and had a much higher risk profile than the covid vaccine.
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Thank you for this instructive historical perspective. Well said. I don't know much about the Eisenhower era. I mean, I've never studied it. However, I grew up under it and benefited greatly from it, including vaccinations, a first-class education in a small, nondescript town, secure home ownership for my lower-middle-class family, and affordable college education. People who experienced that era must find it hard to understand why we would willingly abandon the "general well being that infused the American population." I have said in other posts that that wasn't true for everyone---you had to be in the right place, at the right time, and of the right race and gender---but as someone who was lucky enough to benefit from the post World War II peace and prosperity, I can look back and say that for many of us, it was an idyllic age that I don't expect to see again in my lifetime. We certainly valued freedom in those days and loved our country---there were constant parades in small towns everywhere with lots of flag waving---but freedom was spoken of as a collective value, not so much as an individual right. It was not associated with personal gun ownership, but with democracy and well-being for all of us. Hence it would never occur to us to not get vaccinated, so as to protect everyone.