I’ll admit, I’m not getting the “vax.” No amount of fear porn, “it’s my patriotic duty,” publicly shaming me, or telling me that “I’m protecting other people” will convince me that I should get it. Anti-Vaxxer, I believe I’m called. Many people evidently feel the same way.

Since fear, pride, shame, and concern for others didn’t work, the machine is now using the best of all human traits to coerce us to get vaccinated: Greed. Here are just a few examples to appeal to our greedier side:

The Cincinnati Reds offer discounted tickets for those who received the “vax.”

The Philly Flyers offered up free tickets to a game next year if you got vaxxed before the last game of the season.

New Orleans is offering a “one shot, one pound” event. That’s right, get your free Covid shot and a free pound of steaming crayfish.

West Virginia is offering a $100 Savings Bond if you get the vax and you are between the ages of 16 and 35 years old.

Not to be outdone, Ohio will create a lottery of all vaccinated people in the state and draw one person each day for five days with each winner receiving one million dollars. No worries, it’s Federal money my Ohio friends.

All of this I find quite alarming unto itself but, in the eyes of history, even more so. Many have written about the state of the world compared to Orwell’s 1984 and I won’t touch on that, but I’d rather focus a few years prior to that -- 1952.

In 1952, India was the first Third World country to adopt a population control policy. With pressure from the USA, which leveraged food aid for population control during a time of severe drought, the late 1960s was a boon for sterilizations and IUD insertions. Eat, get sterilized, or die. Pretty straightforward choice.

At some point, I suppose, that method was a little too distasteful for some, so they upped the ante and began, instead, to offer bicycles and transistor radios to the anti-sterilizers. Enter the “gift” phase of the program.

In the 1970s, they moved from the gift to the incentivized phase. In order to be allotted land or have access to electricity, ration cards, medical care, and promotions, you had to have been sterilized.

Where the “incentivized” sterilization did not work, the cases of forced sterilization did. Vasectomy Camps reportedly performed 5,664 operations per day at their peak and, in one year, over eight million people were sterilized.

Clearly getting the COVID vax is different than forced sterilization but there are similarities between the methods used to encourage the desired outcomes. With the country opening again, we are making it past the hunger phase and are clearly in the gift and incentivized phase of the vaccination program.

This of course makes me wonder when the incentivized phase will end and the “forced” phase will begin?

I’m stealing here, but I believe it was George Santayana who said that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

And we are on repeat, my friends….

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