Remember having an opinion? I seem to remember back in the olden times when there existed the ability to share an opinion with someone other than those who’d unwittingly been trapped into a Faustian commitment that rendered listening to your babble inescapable. Boy has that changed. I recall those old timey opinions. They were subtle or nuanced and sometimes unconventional enough to feel like a treat or singular enough to be goose-bump inducing.
These new kinds of opinions are inclusive. That’s another word that doesn’t appear to mean what it used to. What is it with all these words that don’t mean what they used to? Seems to me now it just means that opinion makes you in or else it makes you out. These new kinds of opinions often times appear to me to be conjured and curated by whatever club you’ve attached your sorry ass to and anything that slightly contradicts the groupthink alchemizes into propaganda or mis-information.
I’m giving up having opinions. It’s become too damn dangerous. My political opinions used to come easy and with such clarity but now they just make me ponder bad things. Bad things like: how can I be anti-trucker and still think it’s insane that our government can subjugate rights by invoking the Emergency Measures Act? How can I despise all discrimination and still think freedom of speech is integral? How can I feel that humans are free to identify any way they want yet still feel sex on this planet is binary? So many questions, so much danger.
Oh and then there’s the pandemic.
I remember a time when I was comfortable spouting my opinion that pharmaceutical companies were keenly directed toward markets that would maximize their profits. You know the good old days before big sickness became ubiquitous in the first world and was really just a concern for the poor. Like way back in 2015 when according to the UN 1.6 million people in Africa died from malaria, tuberculosis or HIV. The drugs to prevent these deaths existed in abundance and were extremely affordable, problem was only around 2% were manufactured on the continent and that created a dearth of affordable medicine and the general population couldn’t afford to buy imported treatments.
Oh yeah and also from the UN in’15 - “many African political leaders and development experts believe that the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to offer technical support to African manufacturers. For example, in 2001, 39 international pharmaceutical companies dragged the South African government to court to challenge its plans to manufacture and import cheap, generic HIV/AIDS drugs”.
The UN is a big husky brute of a bureaucracy with a befuddling mandate but sometimes they sure can put lots of good words together into sentences.
But now apparently that we’re faced with this great big batch of white first-world sick all of a sudden if you’re to believe what your own eyes are reading or watching, some grand mal seizure of altruism has come over the pharma bro’s. They’re now unbiased science with a big ol’twist of benevolence and with this motivation have discovered in the relative blink of an eye the vaccines to allow for us to scratch our way back to a semblance of normalcy.
Now I’m all for science. It’s just that science is tied to the free market and the free market has historically been given a pretty wide berth for priorities possibly being open to manipulation and maybe just maybe a little too much emphasis gets directed towards profit and not so much to making all the people feel better. Kinda like how the priority of vaccinating the planet quickly shifted when Omicron hit stride and boosters for the first world once again put worrying about those people on hold.
There’s are a number of terms for “priorities possibly open to manipulation”. My favourite one is corruption and don’t start with the “but they’re businesses and they have to make money” stuff. Free market capitalism wasn’t concocted with the idea for anyone to make this much money.
This here opinion might not make me guest of the day at the next neighbourhood barbecue. In factually based information, when I judge this here opinion based on the stuff my own little beady eyes are reading or watching, I’m pretty sure it’s not an opinion at all. It’s a lead ingot thrust into a fire metastasizing into mis-information gold and apparently I’ve shape-shifted into “one of those”.
These days I spend a lot of my time being anxious and wary of being the sucker momentarily cornered by some buffoon with similar righteous indignation. It’s always so vehement and exacting and forthright and immediately indicates if I’m in the right place. I’m usually not.
But then, this is just my opinion.
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