We Don't Vote For Junior, No No No

 

There has always been an anti-vaccine movement in this country, right from the 1700s. I was blissfully unaware of the history of it. I only learned how many lives vaccines saved. By the time I got around to having a polio vaccine, which killed and crippled so many including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, I was able to enjoy the medicine on a sugar cube. Yum. It’s fading away but I can still see my smallpox vaccine scar. That one hurt. There were no vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and other childhood ails so I developed a natural immunity after getting sick with them.

I was very happy that vaccines had been developed by the time my three kids were born. Natural immunity is a fine thing but the illnesses themselves were a misery. Besides, I saw firsthand some of the side effects issues of these illnesses as a sign language interpreter of the Deaf during the 1980s. I was working at a high school and several of the 15-year-old Deaf kids had been born to mothers who’d gotten rubella while pregnant. Not only were the kids Deaf, but they also had other disabilities as well. My kids were all vaccinated to prevent them from getting sick and possibly suffering side effects from the illnesses.

Over the years, I’ve had many vaccines: tetanus every so often, shingles (never want to get them again!), flu, and all available covid shots.

I first became aware of the theory that the MMR vaccine could cause a child to become autistic. That theory was first advanced in 1998 but I didn’t hear about it until almost 10 years later. Some dude named Andrew Wakefield published false research in the British medical journal Lancet. After conducting realistic research, that document was debunked and retracted by 2010. Meantime, parents suddenly didn’t want their babies getting the MMR because gasp! their children might get autism!

In the midst of all this, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stuck his nose into it. Junior was an environmental lawyer and an effective one. He was a strong advocate and if he’d just kept to that path, my feelings about him would be so different. But in 2005, he wrote this article for Salon and Rolling Stone magazines. He went on about a conspiracy that thimerosal was being used in the MMR vaccine and was causing autism. There were a lot of children diagnosed on the spectrum, but it was more because there was a better understanding of how we think and process things. So Junior was wrong that there was a conspiracy, and he was wrong that there was thimerosal in the MMR vaccine. Research debunked all of that, and Junior should have backed down, taken his theories, and gone back to environmental law.

But he didn’t.

Even though Salon and Rolling Stone both retracted the articles, Junior continues to spread the misinformation almost twenty years later. Not only that but he’s also tacked on a lot more misinformation about HIV and about the covid vaccines.

He is one of the founders of the Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit anti-vax organization that got itself kicked off Instagram and Facebook for publishing misleading misinformation. Even so, he’s managed to scare parents into foregoing important vaccines for their children. Cases of measles are rising again.

Junior has been interviewed by Fox News, which absolutely adores him, and has hung out with QAnon and white supremacist folk. He says he is a Democrat, but why? For the last twenty years, he sure hasn’t been behaving like one.

Most recently, he was interviewed by Joe Rogan. The two of them put their non-medically trained brains together and had a grand old time spouting off all kinds of crazy stuff. Junior thinks Bill Gates put computer chips into people’s brains or bodies. Really? He also thinks that all the requirements for covid vaccines during the pandemic were worse than the Holocaust. The nerve! Rogan still thinks ivermectin is a good cure for covid.

God help us.

Peter Hotez is a scientist that helped developed a low-cost covid vaccine. The vaccine can be used globally, and he won a Nobel Prize for his work. He criticized all of the misinformation on Rogan’s show. Rogan challenged Hotez to come on the show and debate with Junior. He offered to pay Hotez $100,000. Why would a brilliant scientist who accomplished so much condescend to debate with one who isn’t a doctor and is totally clueless about how vaccines work? Hotez said no thanks.

Junior is advancing in the polls, and that gives me agita. People like the name, Kennedy. People of my generation, the Boomers, remember JFK and RFK (the real Bobby) with affection and respect. We remember how other members of the Kennedy family were so active in the needs of the community. I appreciated  Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics. So many members of the family have been involved in good works.  There’s the temptation to automatically support Junior because he’s a Kennedy.

But no!

Here is an excellent, in-depth article. Please read it.

 

The Real RFK & His Awful Offspring

 

To me, he was always Bobby Kennedy.

I was little when he was the Attorney General to his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Later, as a teen and a young adult, I read and learned about the indispensable advice he gave to his brother throughout the crises facing our country.

I heard of him in a disparaging way during my junior high years. He was called a “carpetbagger” because he ran for NY Senator’s seat in Congress. I didn’t understand fully what a carpetbagger was until I read Gone With The Wind. Another accusation I heard was that he was ruthless.

He wanted to help people, especially those in need. His words were fiery sometimes but with the right message. I watched clips of his speeches, and I saw how crowds adored him. I thought he was very brave, standing up in a slowly moving car so that he could shake the hands of people who sometimes would grab hold and hang on. He was almost pulled from his car several times.

I didn’t see him speak to the crowd of people who came to hear him on the night Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. I read his words later and thought to myself, how in tune he was with what people were feeling. After all, hadn’t his own brother been assassinated? He advised the crowd to go home and pray. In other cities, people in grief and rage took to the streets and rioted. But not the people who’d come to listen to Bobby.

I wanted him to be President. I liked what LBJ had done in forming the Great Society and getting so much legislation passed for civil rights. But LBJ’s reputation was in shreds because of the Viet Nam war. Once Bobby’d declared his candidacy, LBJ did the smart thing and withdrew his consideration of running again.

I was aggravated because I was too young to vote, 13. I wanted to discuss Bobby with my parents, but it was too difficult. We were still communicating by lipreading with a few fingerspelled words or signs interspersed. It was hard to have a meaningful conversation, so we all avoided it as much as possible.

Besides, I knew my parents were solid Republicans. They weren’t in favor of civil rights. That always struck me as weird. They’d complain about how hearing people would take advantage of them, keeping them in menial jobs, and making fun of them. So why didn’t they sympathize with Black people? The only answer I’d get was “birds of a feather flock together” …in an ASL idiom meaning the same thing.

I was devastated at the news he’d been shot in California. The early reports said he’d been shot in the head but was being treated at the hospital. Maybe it’s not a bad wound, I thought and prayed for his life to be spared. The later news broke my heart. Now I heard that his wound was so grievous, that if he survived he would be severely disabled and not the man he was anymore.  Not long after that, I heard that he died.

I cried and cried. I cried at this cruel twist of fate that another Kennedy brother fell to the assassination. I cried for the loss of this country. He could have been a great President. I cried for myself and for my shattered faith in prayer. Why would God take another good man from us?

Well, that was 13-year-old me. Now I realize that it’s not God who perpetrates the evil in this world. It’s us, people. Angry people. People who are emotionally disturbed. Sociopaths.

With the loss of Bobby, the way was paved for Richard Nixon. We all know what a disaster that presidency ended up being.

What would our country have been like had Bobby lived?

Since Bobby died, we’ve suffered through the continuation of the Viet Nam into Laos and Cambodia. Watergate. Reagan’s trickle-down economics, which began the destruction of the middle class. Outsourcing. The Iraq War. Note: Afghanistan, I understood. We were going after Osama bin Laden. But the war in Iraq was totally contrived: there were no weapons of mass destruction. A period of calm and progress began with President Obama. Then we abruptly descended into The Upside Down with tRump. He hasn’t gone away so we are still there.

There’s a new presidential election coming next year. Although President Biden has been able to accomplish much in two years despite the constant blocks and obstacles from the Repubs, he remains unpopular. It’s mind-blowing. Still, Biden could win a second term because the Repubs have no one: tRump is running but he’s facing criminal charges and Death Santis just isn’t popular out of the south.

But there is a threat, and that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I don’t imagine many in the younger generations remember the real RFK, Bobby. Junior has the name and is banking on it, but he is NOT his father.  I am adamantly opposed to him, especially since he announced he is running as a Democrat.

A Democrat! He is nothing like a Democrat, so I will call him a Dino.

Russia attacked Ukraine, and they fought back. We have been supporting Ukraine. Jr. thinks we should look at things from Russia’s point of view. Right. The assailant’s point of view. He says President Biden is a warmonger.

He is an anti-vaxxer. He hangs out with white supremacists and ultra-right-wing conservative types. I don’t see him mingling with us common folk. Fox News, the biggest source of conservative conspiracies and misinformation, interviewed him and they absolutely love him!

Junior thinks that all vaccines are bad for us. He’s bought into the idea that the MMR given to children causes autism. He thought the covid vaccine did terrible things to us. Now measles cases among children are rising because ignorant parents are buying into that kind of misinformation. He also pronounces that more people have died from covid vaccinations than from covid. What a big fat lie that is.

He doesn’t support gun control. He thinks the mass shootings are caused by our pharmaceutical drugs. Oh, really?

He supported the release of the man who shot and killed his father, Sirhan Sirhan! That blew my mind away. How could he do it? From what I’ve read, he thinks Sirhan was framed and that his father was actually killed by a security guard. Um, no. Sirhan admitted to it.

What the hell happened to him that so twisted his thinking? He was about my age, maybe a year older, when his father was murdered. How devastating to lose your father like that. He ran into troubles as a teenager and young adult. I don’t think it’s necessary to talk about that except I wonder if those experiences began messing with his thinking cortex somehow.

I read he was an environmental lawyer, which I think is absolutely awesome and shows he must have some caring in him. Yet now he goes about as if he’s some medical expert.

I wish I could like him based on who his father was. Bobby had such warmth in his eyes when he was speaking and interacting with crowds of supporters. I don’t see that in Junior’s eyes. They look cold to me. He is not his father. He might have been but he’s not, nor will he ever be.

Meanwhile, these are just a few articles I’ve been reading about him. I have many more to read through. I may write again about his anti-vaccine misinformation and the harm it’s causing.

Don’t vote for this guy. There's so many red flags. Let's not screw this up again.

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