Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
I Vaccinate My Kids and I Swear I’m Not Selling Anything. Can We Be Friends?
I’m starting this one off with a “Birdbox” reference, because that sure is still relevant! Everyone on the planet watched it at precisely the same time on December 21, 2018, so I’m not worried about spoiling anything for the good people of Ricochet.
Just in case you happened to be wrapping Christmas presents or watching Fox News instead of checking out the new Sandra Bullock movie on Netflix, if you’ve seen M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” or John Krasinski’s “The Quiet Place,” you’ve basically seen “Birdbox.” On the surface, it’s a post-apocalyptic horror movie about a woman who is blindly searching for a safe haven in a world where most of humanity has been compelled to commit mass suicide by a “creature” that’s a death sentence to lay eyes on. But Sandra Bullock has spoken about what the film means to her in interviews, explaining that it’s very much about parenthood. The themes are solid enough; the furious and swift rapids she frantically navigates, the shreds of safety and reliable rules she grasps at, the moments where blind faith is the only terrifying option and she is forced to trust an indifferent force of nature to deliver her family. Almost everything in “Birdbox” can be blatantly or metaphorically guided back to the central theme of parenthood.
Theme is crucial for horror. Often, so is the tenet that when characters are dealing with a monster, there needs to be a kind of logic to it. The vampire only comes out at night and can be killed by a stake in the heart. The werewolf only comes out during the full moon, and is exclusively but unfailingly downed by a silver bullet. The Martians can descend at any time, but if they contract the common cold, they drop like flies. “Birdbox” seems to be setting up a monster that follows a pretty straightforward set of rules at first (you see it, you off yourself), but one widely criticized aspect of the film is the fact that seemingly out of nowhere, at roughly the point where Act II begins, the characters and audience learn that not everyone is affected this way by the creatures.
Rather than immediately committing suicide by whatever means are at hand, there are some individuals who witness the creatures, grow euphoric as they are filled with the glory of the revelation, and become obsessed with forcing all who resist to look. From a storytelling perspective, it makes sense to introduce an element to create some conflict once the characters have basically figured out that they’ll be fine if they just stay inside with the curtains drawn, but going back to Bullock’s parallels, if the creatures represent those things that can hurt our children, ranging from harsh truths to human traffickers to war and disease and ruin, what do the newly minted cultists represent with regards to the theme of parenthood?
The first time I watched Birdbox, I knew. There was no philosophical moment of thought, no hesitation as I really took the opportunity to mull over every facet and possibility.
Good grief, they’re selling MLM Products. That’s what they represent.
Multi-Level Marketing companies insist, vehemently, that they are not pyramid schemes. This is technically true, because there is usually a product being exchanged for the participant’s hard-earned money. That being said, companies like Mary Kay, Lularoe, Herbalife, Perfectly Posh and Pure Romance have gained a certain level of notoriety for seeming innocuous enough but becoming really annoying really quickly when someone you know gets involved. Suddenly, every trip to Sephora is taking a sales opportunity away from your friend who sells makeup, and every time you turn down an invitation to a sales party, you are not being a supportive influence. The dirty secret, of course, is that the product, while real, is window dressing for the true moneymaker: recruiting. You can sell all the 3-D fiber mascara or bedroom tingle jelly in your inventory, and the effort-to-profit ratio is still extremely underwhelming. Of course, the modern MLM relies on weaving the illusion of booming success through social media, with Facebook and Instagram posts crowing about huge paychecks and lavish lifestyles in the hopes of intriguing acquaintances just enough to sign up. And if you do, you’re almost guaranteed to fail, because a whopping 99% of individuals who attempt multi-level marketing involvement lose money on the endeavor. If you’re lucky, it’s only $100 or so for a basic Younique starter package. If you’re not, it’s family-ruining levels of crushing debt and a garage full of unmovable inventory. If you’re extremely unlucky, it’s inventory that has an expiration date.
The business model still has its devotees, in spite of the gutting numbers. Fewer family lifestyle choices are as divisive as Multi-Level Marketing. Vaccination comes close, and I don’t believe it’s a tremendous coincidence that many of the people who love Norwex and Young Living also love to turn their children into modern Typhoid Marys. The common strain is that women, and specifically mothers, are statistically more likely to buy into both the anti-vaxx movement and get drawn into a multi-level marketing company, so there’s bound to be some overlap. Rather than use any kind of cheap and sexist rhetoric to explain this, I believe that much of it just comes down to the fact that while parenting is an incredibly important job, it’s not a tremendously respected one. Being able to rattle off anecdotes about vaccine side effects or running your own “business” creates a sense of exclusive knowledgeability and authority, something that many adult humans who spend the majority of their time with irrational screaming demons crave. It’s as understandable as it is deeply sad. Most mothers of young children today are also millennials, which means that they’re already the butt of many jokes painting them as frivolous, immature and dumb. The rhetoric spun by MLMs is carefully engineered to give an individual feeling judged, stressed, and inadequate the belief they have the potential for power. Income, productivity, and entrepreneurial spirit are all fetishized by our society, and MLM pitches make it sound so easy to have it all and really do the right thing for your family. And the families of others you love, of course, provided they’re willing to see the light.
Recently I found some other local mothers of toddlers on Facebook and we organized an impromptu playdate for our kids, and it was interesting to see how gingerly everyone proceeded when we finally met up at an area bounce house. While our children played, the moms all engaged in light small talk, gently and politely probing, and it was amazing how as conversations split off and grew a little deeper and more intimate, the ice was smashed apart the moment these issues came up. Once “we vaccinate” and “I am not trying to sell you anything or recruit you for my downline” were out of the way, the path ahead to developing genuine and long-lasting connections suddenly seemed possible and exciting. Another very important element that anti-vaxx sentiment and multi-level marketing have in common is that they so thoroughly saturate the personalities of the people who buy in that “cultist” feels depressingly accurate, making warm and caring friendships daunting if not impossible. When every child is endangered by heavy metals and chemicals according to your worldview, and every new friendship is a business opportunity that your success relies on, of course it’s not a topic you can just peacefully set aside for the greater good like politics at your parents’ Easter brunch. On the other side, you have the vaccinating parents, who know that herd immunity only works if your child’s friends are also immunized, as well as the scores of people who just hate feeling pressured to buy essential oils and marital aids from a person who can’t possibly be an expert on medicine or sexuality. I can’t be friends with someone who could make my children sick, and I can’t be friends with someone who is hoping I’m gullible enough to become a “girlboss” under them and risk going into debt.
Most of all, I can’t be friends with someone who is seeing a “creature” that could destroy me and my family, as well as the cohesion and trust of my community. It might be beautiful, truly beautiful, but it’s also a hell of a dealbreaker.
Published in General
Fascinating allegory.
You have pegged Utah. Especially the essential oils part. I’m very sensitive to essential oils, too! Great post!
This really is a striking analogy. You forgot to mention “colloidal silver” along with the Norwex though, and you should never get that stuff mixed with the tingle jelly.
MLM, the business we all love to hate.
Certainly MLM can be cultish. However, having some acquaintance with more than one person damaged by vaccines, I am much more sympathetic to parents who are worried about vaccine safety. Moms are looking for safe, alternative ways to keep their families healthy and also help put food on the table, and the same thing that attracts them to selling miracle supplements may also influence their wariness of vaccines.
Like many conservatives I am wary of anything put out by a government agency, including the CDC, and am much more likely to put credence in reporters like Sharyl Attkisson, who writes that “the massive vaccine industry propaganda movement…is the most successful disinformation smear campaign of our time,” so I don’t see anything cultish about those who worry about the 69 vaccinations our children are now expected to receive. Instead I see reasonably concerned parents. Given the mandates that are being proposed and the money involved, we all ought to be worried.
@sandy I agree that we all ought to be worried, definitely. For very different reasons. But I can’t explain them here, because you’re definitely familiar with the studies I could quote, and you don’t believe they’re factual. I can say the same for your sources. The difference between us is that one of our viewpoints is more widely accepted (mine), and one of them has a narrower but more ardent niche (yours.)
You can’t argue with an atheist by using the Bible, so to speak.
Thank you! There’s a big reason why MLM is so big in Utah, and it has everything to do with the Mormon community. Many MLM companies are founded and helmed by Mormons, and in close-knit and insular communities where traditional family roles are adhered to more strictly, it’s very common to use MLM involvement not only to make money, but as a social outlet. I think what bothers me the most about it is the fact that nothing about it really sounds bad until you think about it on second and third levels, and then of course consider how much money some unfortunate people have lost over them.
What do the lives of vaxxers and non-vaxxers have in common? Almost everything. Many non-vaxxers once made the same statements as those currently vaccinating.
Some were doctors and nurses or held other decent types of science degrees. Some were trades people or business owners who succeeded, although without MBA’s. (Or sometimes with them too.)
Then their child was injured by a vaccine.
Prior to that life altering event, often the person themselves was vaccine injured, but the brainwashing is so extensive that the individual takes the philosophy of “It was a fluke.” That is my case. I suffered with Guillain Barre from a1976 swine flu vaccine. However I did not want to divest myself of the virtue signalling that being pro-vax allowed me. So I remained convinced of vaccination’s huge safety record.
That changed during the initial months in 1998 when I was appointed to a health council in one of Calif’s northern counties. I was appointed to that position due to my extensive record as a pesticide researcher. This was long before the days of the internet. So to arrive at what was being said by researchers critical of pesticides, I had to physically attend state wide and national conferences.
Through these conferences, I learned about remarkable people like Marc Lappe. Lappe had been a top investigator for Stanford Research Institute. He was decently paid and lauded inside the field. Then one day he refused to fudge the data on a malathion research project. That refusal on his part was the end of his career as a corporate-controlled scientist.
Of course, he went on to found his own institute. Side note: I owe him my life, as he was the only person I had heard of who let me know that glutathione could reverse my Multiple Sclerosis symptoms, if taken within 24 h0urs of the symptoms’ presentation.
Anyway, once on the health council, I met the same types of anguished scientists whose refusals to fudge data, jimmy results by ignoring the “outliers” in the data field, or whose offense against the scientific community was a simple request to change the adjuvant just slightly. Through those lacks of cooperation, these men and women became pariahs in their field, the field of developing vaccines.
End of Part One
Part Two:
Why were these former employees of Big Pharma anguished? Usually, like Lappe, they went on to become the owners of labs, or else they became expert witnesses at trials. Often,once established at their new calling, they ended up making more money at their new pursuits than before. Although their expertise meant the family received the tremendously huge settlement for a vaccine injury, they could never reveal what was stated in the court released reports of Big Pharma’s neglect and willful participation in remaining unsafe. So they were anguished over the huge amounts of injury that were occurring.
We as a public have ignored the quite sound advice offered in the early 1990’s to have single shots instead of three vaccines in one shot. Right now there are proposals for six shots at a time. And eight! A tipping point, a very sad and tragic tipping point is being reached. Those who graduated from medical or nursing school are told that vaccines are 100% safe, or perhaps that statement was modified to “the USA’s vaccine policy causes only one injury per one million shots.” However, the American populace is now raising autistic children at a rate of 1 in every 64 toddlers and children above toddler age who now carry that diagnosis.
Each and every week of the year, at least one of the vaccine sites I am on is admitting a new member whose child is covered head to toe with a rash, that no doctors can figure out. Or the baby is paralyzed. Or if hit up with 9 shots in one day so “this baby can catch up on his vaccine schedule” the baby’s funeral is now underway.
It has also been interesting to find out that when newer doctors now on these sites are queried, they admit that except for memorizing the vaccine schedule and a brief history of the life and times of Ed Jenner, they had little exposure to vaccines. Many doctors get their med degree without ever so much as reading a single vaccine’s insert brochure.
There are no reasonable alternatives to vaccination. It’s fine if you want to work with your physician on pacing the vaccinations or delaying them – I get that completely. However, I would ask how confident you are in your sources? Is it enough that the government be saying the opposite?
Bluntly, I don’t want deliberately un-vaccinated children in public schools whatsoever. I support businesses refusing service to children who lack immunization to highly communicable diseases. I support strict quarantine measures – disease control is one of the few things that needs an aggressive government hand.
You’ve heard this all before and I don’t legitimately expect it to change your mind. But I don’t want people wandering casually through this comments section to believe I don’t know how to respond.
Well, most of Western society has established they’d rather have a dead child than a Downs Syndrome one, so it’s not surprising antivaxxers feel the same way about autism. Let’s face it: if there was a prenatal test for autism, autism rates would drop like a stone.
Perfectly fine not to get into the whole discussion here, but I think your reasoning is a bit cynical, or maybe you just think that my “side” is simply emotional. By the way, I find it amusing that you think that those worried about vaccine safety are more “ardent.” I don’t think I could out-ardent mainstream opinion on vaccination, a subject that is practically untouchable.
I feel that it’s a false equivalency to compare autism and Down’s Syndrome, and even if it wasn’t, there’s a lot of nuance to both conditions. Would you rather raise a high-functioning autistic child, or a low-functioning Down’s Syndrome child? Would you rather raise a low-functioning autistic child, or a child with Down’s Syndrome who is right in the middle? A brilliant autistic child who is riddled with anxiety and reliant on you for everything, or a pleasant-tempered Down’s Syndrome child who will be able to hold down a job in food service? People know at or before a child’s birth if they have a child with Down’s Syndrome, but autism, while it is detectable early, doesn’t present until a parent has had many months to grow attached to their infant. I think that given how common autism is compared to Down’s Syndrome, raising autistic children is the reality for many more parents. Many autistic children eventually grow up, go to college, have careers, get married and have children. Aside from both being developmental conditions, Down’s Syndrome and autism don’t have much in common at all.
Yep. But
I haven’t seen Birdbox. I can’t conceive of watching a movie — much less a horror movie — with “Birdbox” as the title. (What’s a birdbox? A box. For birds. Shouldn’t that be enough?) But if the theme of Birdbox is parenting, I wonder if the MLM scheme Birdbox has in mind is parenting itself.
For example, the mommy wars. It’s not just MLM schemes, or even vaccine controversies, that have mommies relentlessly trying to recruit other mommies to The Cause. It is motherhood itself. Every aspect of it.
Are you for or against attachment parenting? Do you / don’t you use daycare? What’s your stance on breastfeeding? (Do we need a “stance” as long as our kids are fed and healthy?) What about toilet-training habits? Toothbrushing habits? Gendered clothing and toys?…
Parenting is a job that often doesn’t get much respect. And so, to counter that, many want to turn parenting into A Cause. If it’s A Cause then it gets respect, and this means politicizing parenthood — and let’s be honest about who’s likely doing the parenting: politicizing motherhood. It’s not just leftists politicizing motherhood, either. There are plenty of mommy-bloggers over at The Federalist doing it, too. (Now that I’m a mom myself, the politicization of motherhood over at The Federalist has become frankly off-putting to me.)
Some of my favorite rants against politicizing motherhood come from a mom who later became quite politicized herself (alas).One’s called “Hey, hi. I want off your parenting team.” Another’s called, “I wish they’d stop calling it sacred.” It’s understandable we want to sacralize motherhood, especially when we sense it doesn’t get enough respect otherwise. But then that turns motherhood into A Cause. Into a MLM with no escape — unless you do succeed in subjecting your family to murder-suicide.
Years ago we had close friends that we did EVERYTHING with; vacations, parties, dinners, etc. Then they invited us to a “party” at their house, and it turned out to be an Amway party. We declined to buy/sell anything, and now we’ve probably seen them 6 times in the last 20 years.
Monsterphobe!
I’m actually a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Now being shortened to Latter Day Saints instead of Mormons. :)
Also, in the last few years, the general authorities of our church have talked about things like this, over the pulpit, in General Conference. In fact, they have warned people against using the Church as a means to boost their businesses. It isn’t fun having to avoid your neighbors or relatives because they’re going to accost you at every turn to sell something.
I think that there are gullible people everywhere. I made up my mind a long time ago not to get involved in any MLMs. If there’s “easy money,” it’s usually too good to be true.
Yes! I could tell that one of my in-laws got into a business, but wouldn’t give me the proper name. When I finally got a name, I went straight to the internet and found that it’s parent company was Amway. I told them “good luck” and cautioned them what would happen when people found out.
It’s sad. The MLMs usually prey on those who need the money the most and con them into believing that their way is the way they’ll get out of it.
My points are:
It’s quite eye-opening to read Sarah Hoyt’s blog when she talks about how her mother grew up in Portugal in the 1950s. As schoolgirls, the kids would bury their homemade cloth dolls at the end of each school year in imitation of the funerals of their classmates. As teenagers, the girls would sew two infant shrouds for their trousseau because they expected to lose at least two children to infant diseases we vaccinate against.
Personally, I think anyone would rather murder their child or just flirt with his death by a preventable disease to avoid having a kid who won’t be worth bragging about at the coffee klatch ought to be barren. But the Management and I don’t see eye to eye on this point.
This resonated and is a very powerful image. I didn’t know know about it and I appreciate you sharing.
Wow! Way to reinforce the stereotype that Mormons are extremely kind and gentle people. <3
I didn’t know that the church itself was speaking out against the damaging effects of MLM within the community. I’m really glad to hear it.
I love your comment. I just wanted to tell you as much. “Sanctimommies” are everywhere, and I try to avoid the attitude. The only issues I get fired up about are MLM and vaccinations, really; otherwise I make every effort to be chill, accepting, and understanding, knowing that we’re all doing a difficult and under-appreciated job.
Her posts are refreshingly counter-cultural and I especially found her research on mothers wanting to be home with kids but can’t vs working but can’t to be interesting.
Also, she is not wrong on mandatory paid maternity leave.
Not me.
Not me.
Guess I live a quiet life.
I wish mothers would just approach this as polling for experience and mining for tools. A mother needs every tool she can find in her arsenal to adjust to the different needs of their kids. Some might go unused. Others might be unexpectedly welcome in times of crisis.
I know an anti-vaxxer who gives her kids immunity boosting smoothies every morning. I vaxxed mine, but my middle child had ridiculously high, unexplained, and frequent fevers (not vaccine related). I used her smoothie recipe to great effect. Just an accumulated tool from an unexpected source.
So what about gardisil?
That’s the only vaccine I refuse to subject my kids to.
Eh, if I ever had kids, I’d want them to get it — after all, even one only ever has sex with one person, if one’s partner isn’t a virgin one can still get the disease — but that’s one I do disagree with making that one mandatory for schools and such, as the school has bigger problems if sexual activity is so normal that the vaccine is necessary.
Yes, it is sad when people decide to monetize their relationships. It tends not to go well. Same as spouse business teams. You can’t really have both, business and personal relationships. The personal relationship is more valuable, the business one cheapens it. Kills the valuable parts.
A lot of what you say sounds rational – certainly giving multiple vaccines in one shot seems to be tempting fate.
However, your statistics about autism are questionable. And the key is probably in the word “diagnosis.” Diagnosing autism is not cut and dried – particularly when parents realize they are eligible for financial and other assistance (special ed) when their child has that diagnosis.
Secondly, stating that every week you see some new person on a vaccine site relating their child’s problems is anecdotal, not statistical. Additionally, there is no way that you can know whether they are accurate, inaccurate, or lying. I am sure you are aware that people say all kinds of things on the internet for all kinds of reasons.