Back when I was a young’un, country folks used some terminology and speech patterns that differed from those who were the arbiters of correctness. Some things had been with them since their ancestors migrated from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the English midlands. Some were borrowed from African slaves and their descendants. Some were local – even individual – inventions. The necessity of communicating with people from a wider world required change, even loss of many linguistic peculiarities.

However, although I have a string of degrees involving highly-structured and correct communication, I find some old ways of thinking/speaking/writing to be useful. “Puzzlement” is a term with several applications. “It’s a puzzlement to me” means the speaker cannot make sense of conditions or personal traits or actions. It does not mean that the user is stupid, naive or ignorant, only that “why” should be answered.

For me, “it’s a puzzlement” applies to many things in the current world. I’ll start with anti-vaxxing is a puzzlement. In this country – and to a degree elsewhere – people are refusing to be vaccinated or allow their children to be vaccinated, not just for COVID, but also the long established DPT and MUR shots and polio vaccine. Having lived when death and crippling from childhood diseases were common, such ideas and behaviors make no sense to me. Our children got all of the preventative shots as soon as possible, but we had to wait with nagging fear for the creation of the polio vaccine.

I invite you back to my childhood. By age 10, I had had all of the childhood diseases of that time: whooping cough (pertussis), diphtheria, measles (rubeola), German measles (rubella), mumps and chicken pox. Most of these could be serious, even fatal. I had pneumonia at age 5, but newly-discovered sulfanilamide wiped it out quickly. But earlier, childhood pneumonia almost killed my father and left him with a big scar on his back, where a tube had been inserted to drain fluids from his lungs. 

I was fortunate to survive my childhood diseases, but if I had not gotten a vaccine, chicken pox could still revisit me as shingles.

Others died. Two of Daddy’s siblings and a niece died as toddlers. My maternal grandmother lost two sisters and a niece. Visit the cemetery plot of Uncle Benny and Aunt Mary Collins, sister of my maternal grandfather, and count the little graves of their children. Check out old cemeteries; they are full of similar mute tellers of tragedy.

Aunt Lissie Williams was left alone with her children while Uncle Malcolm, Grandaddy’s brother, sought work during the Great Depression. The youngest, just a baby, fell ill. Mother, then about 19 years old, went to help and was there when the child died. Aunt Lissie washed the body of her baby, dressed it in her best little dress and laid her out on an ironing board to cool. At that moment Uncle Malcolm walked through the door, having completed his return home. He surveyed the scene, leaned his head against the door frame and cried.

Glen was one of my childhood friends. Polio struck him and his brother, killing the brother and twisting his body horribly. I remember the abiding grief in their parents’ eyes. I remember Vernon, an older boy who rode our school bus. He always sat on the front seat next to the steps. He quickly went down the steps when the bus stopped at Glen’s house to gently help him up the steps and he repeated the process in reverse in the afternoon. Angels sometimes come disguised as country boys. With help from a kinsman, Glen earned a degree from Georgia Tech and had a fruitful career as a civil engineer. He retired and moved back home, but died too soon.

Resistance to vaccination is not new. In the 19th century, some clerics and politicians railed against it as a tool of the devil. But by the time I was in grammar school, the sorrow and loss attached to suffering, fear and death drowned those false objections. Public nurses came to our school, set up in a room and gave combination shots and small pox vaccinations to all. Later came DPT (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus) and MUR (measles, mumps and rubella) shots. Then came polio vaccines. Our children never had any of those diseases and they almost vanished in the U.S.

Now they are coming back. There have been significant measles outbreaks this year. Polio could be next. Whose children and grandchildren might become victims? Antivaxx ideology is the root of the threat. Its sources are several: some religious leaders stuck in the B.C. era, political figures whose ambitions are fueled by distrust and discontent, media enabled mischief makers and uninformed people who think they know but don’t.

The unchecked power of social media can be useful under the boundaries of morality and truthfulness. But it can be – and has been –  a tool to spread disinformation and despicable lies. In the case of anti-vaxxing, the cost will be sickness, even death, for incalculable numbers of people.

Roger G. Branch Sr. is professor emeritus of sociology at Georgia Southern University and is a retired pastor.