Parents should vaccinate their kids

During my time as a contributor to The Eagle, I have received my fair share of criticism. Some people have told me that my opinion articles are good, and sometimes, people tell my opinions suck. But, that’s their opinion, and I’ve never really cared much about negative feedback.

I can understand constructive criticism, but when people just say, “Hey man, your opinion is bad and you should feel bad,” as far as I’m concerned, they can go fall into a volcano, or something of a similar nature.

But over the course of the weekend, I was notified that a piece of homework I did was docked points, partially on grounds of “civility.” I wasn’t quite sure what I had done wrong, so I went to Sakai to see what the fuss was about.

Upon further investigation, I found out that someone didn’t like my forum post, and ended up being a little tense about it. The topic of discussion was immunizations and children. To be exact, we were debating whether or not you should have your children immunized.

In hindsight, I should have clarified that I was being sarcastic because there were some people who didn’t pick up on it. I can’t say that I blame them though; sarcasm isn’t very easy to pick up over text, so if I have made anybody feel offended, I apologize.

However, on the topic of civility, I will say this: I acknowledge the fact that there will be people that get offended once in a while by my opinion. However, the way they react to my opinion, especially when I’m not specifically being condescending to anyone, should not dictate whether I was being civil or not. I do believe that people should get their kids immunized. It’s either that or having them die young of tuberculosis or black death, or something equally painful.

Growing up in western Nebraska, I have been exposed to a lot of unusual (i.e. Republican) politics, and one of the things that used to be all the rage were swine flu vaccines.

I don’t know if you remember, but swine flu used to be a big deal back in 2009 when nobody really had anything to report on, so why not make a problem?  It was like watching a game of Pandemic 2 come to life. As such, vaccines were administered all across the country, and eventually to school children. I was in the eighth grade when this was going on, so I got mine, mostly because I didn’t want to get freaking swine flu. That would suck.

But I knew a lot of other people who didn’t get their shots because of two things; their parents’ horrible belief that vaccines lead to autism, and their parent’s over-hyped belief that the vaccine wasn’t tested. Lo and behold, some of the people who weren’t immunized caught the bug and ended up taking a nice little trip to the hospital. To me, that’s just irresponsible parenting.

Since when should parents’ stupidity decide whether or not their child has access to the same medical treatment as everyone else? That is a horrible way to parent. It’s almost as bad as “pox parties.”

For those who aren’t familiar, a pox party is the act of dragging your kids to a sleepover where one of the kids has chicken pox. The idea is to get your kids sick and supposedly strengthen their immune systems.

Fortunately, there are better ways to strengthen your child’s immune systems. They are called vaccines. Plus, it’s a lot simpler than trying to force your kid to get chicken pox.