I know him. The vaccinator is a distant friend with warm eyes, but I don’t dare to hug him in greeting. He’s bailed me out before, but now he’s looking down. It used to vibrate with zest for action, but now it looks dull.
The refusal to vaccinate doesn’t try to convince me that the syringe is poison. But he would like to speak about our country: “Everyone is in line. You can no longer move freely. ”His German homeland has become alien to him. “Somehow I don’t belong anymore,” he says.
I haven’t seen him for a long time, now I’m almost astonished that the person who refused to vaccinate doesn’t have a swastika tattoo on his arm, just the peace sign, which I already know, and a small corona tummy. He likes my homemade cookies. It was never on the right, but you read a lot now. A “social pest” is the vaccination refusal, and just: “right”. It could be that the vaccination refusal is involved as a parent representative and in the union, that he reads decent books and was a triathlon participant, that he pays attention to regional origin, fair production conditions and careful animal husbandry when shopping, that he is a loving father and affectionate lover easily overlooked when staring at the syringe.
The person who refuses to vaccinate is sitting in my kitchen, dangerously close to the aerosol, and looks sad. And I have a bad feeling. His non-vaccination is pushed between us.
The vaccination refusal tells how bad things have happened to a mutual acquaintance. “Double vaccinated. Now intensive care unit. “The vaccination refusal is not a corona denier. Some of his friends are ill, most recently his unvaccinated younger son. “But he’s fit again.”
The person who refuses to be vaccinated is actually a completely normal man
The refusal to vaccinate reported from a colleague: “Shingles across half the face after the injection!” Others would have been seriously ill in bed for weeks after the vaccination. I say that, of course, he pays special attention to such cases, as confirmation. He grins and nods. He’s not stupid. But he doesn’t want the state to tell him what to do with his body. He doesn’t have the confidence.
Actually, the vaccination refusal is a completely normal man, from a humble background in East Germany, an apprenticeship because he was not allowed to study. “The party, the party is always right,” he quotes former slogans. He already knew then that this was not true, everyone knew it, “but everyone pretended to be. And now I am suddenly supposed to believe everything? Or pretend again? ”When the general compulsory vaccination comes, he wants to emigrate. To Poland. Or to Russia. “Be free.”
The freedom he thinks is a false one, I hear. Some even speak of one degenerate Concept of freedom. the right one Freedom is not individualistic, but based on solidarity. Morally and politically correct is only freedom that freely agrees with the politically imposed restrictions on freedom. Ulbricht could not have expressed it better: freedom as subordination, as classification into the collective, as the erasure of individual feelings and needs. Only collective freedom makes you free!
The practical part is the illusion of clarity. The annoying ambivalence that once accompanied the debate about freedom and security can be thrown into the rubbish heap of history. Away with it! Thinking forward! Progress! One can now be militantly intolerant to one’s heart’s content and not only feel solidarity, liberal and responsible, but also as an advocate of the only true, blissful freedom. It is almost understandable that some people sense “re-education”.
To instrumentalize the concept of freedom by ideologizing it as a tool to restrict it has always been an ingenious move. Perhaps the vaccinator is smarter than some solidarity pathetic because he is so free not to participate in such freedom?
He doesn’t want to be to blame for anything
The refusal to vaccinate has children like other people. His wife does not vote and ticks esoterically. She refuses vaccinations. This makes him less dogmatic. The vaccinator refused to listen to a lot of Germany radio, but he could not stand any public media at the moment. Because they talk about him like a noxious insect. Or at best like about a child who has to be convinced of the healthy soup. But most of the time people talk about the refusal to vaccinate as about a pandemic general guilty, and the German people appear as believers who are now collecting the debt with the help of the media and the measures.
The refusal to vaccinate does not want to be to blame for everything. He just doesn’t want to get vaccinated. He is afraid of long-term effects. He’s afraid of being brainwashed. And what he is most afraid of is Karl Lauterbach. Because he lied in the middle of TV when it came to a drug with fatal consequences. “That was before Corona.” I don’t know what he is referring to, but that politicians don’t always tell the truth doesn’t seem entirely unlikely to me.
“The vaccinations are an experiment on billions of people,” says the vaccinator. I advise him not to say something like that in public. “Do you notice what?” He asks me. “What?” “It’s like in the GDR. Some things are not allowed to be said. ”I refrain from saying that he would rather keep that to himself.
I would prefer he got vaccinated. He is in his fifties. His parents are vaccinated, and so is his older son. The vaccination refusal tolerates all of this, he does not want to convince anyone of his conviction: “Everyone as he thinks”.
Those who refused to vaccinate always liked to go to the swimming pool, several times a week. Not anymore, because of 2G. He is also not allowed to go to the cinema, to the gym, to the café, to the clothing store or to the hairdresser. Not even a mulled wine at the Christmas market is in it for him.
“Do you remember how the hairdressers opened again in the first or second wave?” He asks me. “That’s right, because of human dignity,” I remember. “There was still no vaccine,” explains the refusal to vaccinate. “Now human dignity only applies to those who have been vaccinated.”
“The vaccination is less dangerous than Covid,” I try to argue. “Maybe,” he says, “I wouldn’t think twice about Ebola. But there were reports at the beginning of the pandemic. They then disappeared. I don’t believe in a conspiracy either, but it does seem strange to me. In addition, I am not getting vaccinated against the flu. “
“Flu is not as bad as Corona,” I interject.
“But tens of thousands die from it every year,” says the vaccinator.
“Anyway, I don’t want to get it,” I say. “I’m happy about my booster appointment.”
“Yes, yes, you are a doctor’s daughter, you take a scientific approach,” he says. “I understand. But I don’t like to hedge against everything. I also like to leave doors unlocked. I think risks are part of life. You may think that’s stupid, but as long as I don’t harm anyone else with it … “
“Well, somehow it does harm,” I object, “because the pandemic is dragging on and because more people are getting infected.”
The vaccinator isn’t sure if that’s true, and frankly, I am not. Or am I not allowed to say that either, as in the GDR?
“Maybe the viruses mutate like crazy because you vaccinate into a pandemic,” he says, “that’s what scientists once said.” And maybe vaccination doesn’t help as much as one should believe? But he’s glad I’m not judging him.
“Hey, just get vaccinated,” I suggest, “then we can go to the cinema again and think of something else. Or in the sauna. “
“Never!” He says. “Especially not now. Then I get defiant too. “
When I say goodbye, I hold my breath before I hug him and feel ashamed. Because the person who refuses to be vaccinated is stigmatized as anti-social in the name of the only true collective freedom. And I watch it – but he’s my friend! Who has bailed me out several times without asking what’s in it for him. I am ashamed of a country in which freedom is only conceivable to a limited extent as a morally pure zone from which those who think differently are locked out. I don’t really want to live in a country like that.
Then I air it. Longing.
.