To the Journal editor:

Historians have said that the Revolutionary War may not have gone our way unless Washington had mandated a primitive smallpox vaccine for his soldiers in 1777.

Smallpox and other diseases had been raging through the Continental Army, inflicting a higher kill rate than the battlefield. The vaccine’s success in helping turn the war effort into victory commenced the beginning of mandated military vaccines which continue to this day.

Millions of soldiers have been shot assembly line style with up to 17 vaccines for decades. This is done to achieve troop readiness and for the good of the whole. Has the good of the whole become an unworthy effort? Is our country being unraveled from within by selfish individualism based on false conspiracy theories and disinformation spread by TV and internet hucksters?

By definition, this is called willful ignorance.

We are the richest country in the world with more freedoms than anywhere else. Yet we were rendered somewhat powerless by those same freedoms and a growing political ideology which places populism, nationalism and a Libertarian bent above all else.

Our country should have easily been on the other side of the virus by now.  Instead, we still lead the world in cases and deaths. Almost 750,000 Americans have died from this virus in just over 1.5 years! Many thousands needlessly. Most citizens are numb to this horrific devastation. Hospitals in lesser vaccinated areas have had to forgo other life-sustaining health care. The supply chain is threatening to seize up again which will further impact inflation.

We resemble a third-world country in regards to political discourse and increasing violence. People have been killed over masking policies. Health care heroes from a year ago are now being verbally accosted and threatened for doing the same job they did last year. An old axiom states that manners are the glue that holds a civil society together. Is civility dead?

If our parents had been as negatively influenced 60 years ago as the vaccine naysayers of today are, the mandated vaccinations we got as children wouldn’t have happened. Eradicated diseases would not have been eradicated. Our military would be continually hobbled by disease.

The good of the whole is seldom ever superseded by the selfish good of the one. Ironically, the false freedoms they ascribe to make their position a hypocritical oxymoron as they inhibit our country’s growth and infringe on my freedoms and pocketbook.