Pulled up in the street, a dear old friend tore strips off me for writing that stupid pro-vaccination letter to The Echo. ‘You live in an alternative culture! How could you possibly put out such a thing? What about Big Pharma profiteering? What about mRNA vaccines being untried? ‘ (Both True).
I might be alternative but I’m not stupid. I still drive on the left.
I just told him that I am the poster child of vaccination. I’ve been vaccinated dozens of times since I was a baby. I didn’t catch polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, smallpox, tetanus, yellow fever, black water fever, cholera, typhoid – all thanks to vaccines.
Well, he and I may just as well have been standing on opposite sides of the universe for all the common ground we shared on covid vaccination.
In Mullum, and in my pretty rainforest valley, I feel like a stranger in a strange land, living in a parallel universe of wildly differing beliefs. I feel alienated from most of my neighbours. I just don’t raise the subject… don’t mention ‘the V word’. It’s a bit like the same disquiet Jews might have felt in Germany in the 1930s.
There was no guarantee when we came down from the trees that living on earth would be easy. For billions, life is a daily shit-storm surviving and a struggle finding enough to eat. By contrast, I live in a very privileged world. I drive on the left, in a relatively orderly manner, and I’m grateful the roads are paved and thankful we live in such a cared-for and compassionate society.
I may not believe in a Creator God, but I do believe in Science and much of the status quo. But then covid came along. Now in Mullum I’m the guy driving on the wrong side of the road and dodging oncoming traffic.
It used not to matter that I think astronomy is real and astrology is nonsense. That crop circles were discredited and chem-trails are just con-trails. That Trump wasn’t the new Messiah and Hillary Clinton wasn’t a baby eater. That the Deep State wasn’t really pulling the levers and that we are all sheeple! It was all just blah, blah, blah! Damned beliefs! There are as many beliefs as there are stars in the sky. In fact probably no two people on Earth share exactly the same beliefs. Not even identical twins!
What we do mostly share, our common ground, are our values. Our appreciation of nature and the clean air we breathe. Our beliefs in racial and sexual equality. Our love of beauty, and children, and animals, our kindness and the ethics that give us our moral compass. There are thousands of shared values. And boy do we need to find some common ground right now.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
