How to tell when someone's out to punish you rather than help you: A primer
We’ll be brief here: In any conflict where you yourself are in need of a solution, you can easily tell if someone is trying to hurt you rather than help you if they deny you the opportunity to help yourself. What does this mean? Here’s a great example:
The New Zealand parents who refused to allow blood transfusions for their sick 4-month-old child unless they came from donors unvaccinated against COVID-19 have been temporarily stripped of medical custody of the baby.
New Zealand’s High Court on Wednesday ordered that the infant, identified in documents only as Baby W, be placed into the guardianship of health authorities until after he undergoes an urgently needed open-heart surgery and recovers. …
Baby W’s parents had said they had unvaccinated donors willing to give blood for their son’s surgery, but health officials argued that such directed donations should only occur in exceptional circumstances, such as for recipients with very rare blood types.
Health authorities also said the unvaccinated donors wouldn’t necessarily give them access to all the blood products they might need during the boy’s surgery.
Got that? The parents themselves had evidently already done the legwork to find the necessary unvaccinated donors, yet the government just responded, “Eh, nah, we don’t really want to do that.” Almost as an afterthought they cited purely hypothetical concerns, ones that could easily be addressed by some absolutely simple workaround: “We’ll use unvaccinated blood so long as the donors can provide us with the products we need; if not, we’ll use whatever blood is available, vaccinated or unvaccinated.” It’s so easy that it barely even merits an explanation.
The aim of the government here wasn’t necessarily to argue in the best interest of the child in question; it was to break the child’s parents to the saddle of COVID orthodoxy. The politics of COVID—and of vaccines in particular—are so ruthlessly orthodox that even in instances like these, where the dissenters make practical allowances for their own heterodoxy, cannot be tolerated.
This is a good lifelong lesson to which you can refer when you need it: If someone refuses for no reason to allow you to do things for yourself, they don’t want to help you; in all likelihood they want to hurt you in some way. Keep that in the forefront of your mind, in this brave new world where parents lose control of their children under circumstances like this.