Washington, D.C. city councilwoman Mary Cheh introduced a bill that would allow minors to consent to vaccination without parental knowledge: https://legiscan.com/DC/text/B23-0171/id/1948361

Here is the email I just sent her way:

Dear Councilwoman Cheh,

I am alarmed and deeply troubled by the bill you recently introduced to the DC city council that would allow minors to consent to vaccination without parental permission.

While there are certainly arguments to be made for the benefits of vaccines, the long-term health consequences, and potentially serious side effects, of vaccinations have not been examined in any meaningful way.

Any decision around a child’s health must involve their parents or guardians. Only parents have the unique understanding and love for their children to understand what is right for their health. I believe that vaccines are not for everybody, and must be used only when the particular risks and benefits are carefully considered for each individual. This process simply must involve the parents! We do not allow children to vote, purchase drugs or alcohol, travel, drive cars, or go to the movies without adult supervision—we certainly cannot allow them to submit to potentially dangerous medical procedures!

I urge you to consider the special power of a mother’s intuition when it comes to knowing what’s best for her child, and understand how this bill denies the value of this intuition and limits the ability of a mother or father to care for their child.

The truth about viruses and disease will one day become clear, and I assure you that vaccines will no longer be seen as safe, effective, or even necessary. Are you quite sure that you want to be remembered as the person who helped grant the pharmaceutical industry backdoor access to our children’s bodies?

Should just one child’s life be compromised by a vaccine they receive without parental consent, are you prepared to live with that? I’m afraid that you won’t likely be allowed to forget it.

I understand that these are strange and desperate times, and that we’re all doing our best to cope with the madness we see in the world. Please, Ms. Cheh, let’s not forget our humanity in this moment. There are many problems worth addressing in our world today, but a parent’s right to care for their child is not one.

Sincerely,
Gabriel Roberts
Craftsbury, VT

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If you would like to share your concerns with Ms. Cheh, please email her at: mcheh@dccouncil.us , or call her office at: (202)-724-8062 or (202) 724-8118

Love this from an article titled “Why Utah now has first ‘free range’ parenting law”

She said she first realised there was a disconnect between what parents want and what they actually do when she was brought on a popular US morning programme to discuss a viral blog post about allowing her nine-year-old son ride the subway alone.

The staff of the programme all remembered having similar freedoms as children, but confessed they wouldn’t allow their own children to do the same.

“We’re being hypocrites because we’re coming to the erroneous conclusion that any time a child is unsupervised they’re automatically in danger and it’s not true,” she says.

So what’s changed? “Parents’ perception of how dangerous the world is has changed over the years,” says Dr Gail Saltz, a professor of psychology at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Parental anxiety, Saltz says, is inflamed by a global, always-on news cycle, as well as increased connectivity on social media platforms, which recycles “over and over again” kidnappings, rape and other threatening incidents.

While violent crime has dropped sharply in the US in the past 25 years, Americans generally perceive crime rates are continuing to climb, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center.

Saltz also says present-day parenting is less communal than it used to be and has turned into a “competitive sport” for many. This results in parents’ tendency to “helicopter” their children more often, Saltz says, to appear as though they’re “winning” against their peers.

For the second time in my life, I’ve given up trying to take days off from drinking coffee.  I’m drinking it every day and enjoying it.  The battle line is now drawn at one cup per day.  Instead of struggling to get through the morning hours of my designated non-coffee days with a cup of watery tea (it was never a question of feeling groggy or needing caffeine, more one of forgoing the delicious robust flavor and pleasant ritual of coffee), I now struggle to resist the urge to go buy a second cup of coffee on my morning break—especially when it’s 15 degrees outside, and I’m working, for God’s sake, earning money and therefore “deserving” a cup of coffee.

Headaches and light-headedness will set in if I push my consumption further!  This is what I tell myself, but the whole idea of worrying myself over a couple cups of coffee is rather absurd, as my wife points out.  Plenty of folks drink way more coffee and are perfectly fine.  I have three concerns, though, that rattle in my brain every day: leakage, body odor, and loss of taste.

The leakage is real, and I wonder if all coffee drinkers suffer from this.  Just a little bit after going pee, unless I take an extra five minutes to stand frozen over the toilet (or frozen patch of ice) into which I’m peeing, waiting for that last little bit to make its way down and out.  I’m almost 100% convinced this is coffee-related, but is perfectly dry underwear really worth two or three days without coffee?

My friend Stu once said that he thinks coffee gives him body odor.  Stu is a very handsome man, and I always considered him successful and balanced and happy, and admired him as such, and was greatly relieved when I heard that he drinks coffee every day.  It could be lots of other things, of course, but when I find myself smelling the day after having taken a shower and vigorously scrubbed my armpits, I search for something to blame and coffee is the natural choice.

Lastly, I worry about losing my tasting ability.  My wife once told me that she did a tasting exercise in college, and that daily coffee drinkers had a harder time tasting bitterness, thanks to the regular blasting of their palettes with bitter coffee.  This has stuck in my mind, and with every sip that I eagerly take onto the tip of my tongue, I worry that I’m destroying those sensitive buds and am walking the road towards becoming an old man who pours salt on all his meals except breakfast cereal, onto which he pours sugar (this was my grandpa in his later years).

The irony of all this concern is that I regularly spend hours each day bathing in toxic fumes from paints, primers, and lacquers, or swimming in clouds of fiberglass dust.  While I make more of an effort than I once did to pause and gear up properly, I still am frequently exposed to the worst chemicals of modern building materials.  Like yesterday, when I spent five hours painting the interior of a small municipal building the color grey, using first a primer and then a paint that wiggled like cold bone broth, and came home to my wife who immediately exclaimed that I smelled like chemicals.  Twelve hours later, after changing clothes and eating meals and exercising and drinking water and brushing teeth (twice) and sleeping, there’s still a slight taste of chemical in my mouth.  And here I am agonizing over six ounces of coffee.