before you decide you don't want to vaccinate your children you should have to take a 4 hour cemetery tour with me where i point out every tiny little headstone of a child that died from a preventable disease and is buried with their parents who would have done anything to save them
now if you look to your left you can see that this family, like many others, had so many children die so quickly that they built a single shared memorial to all their dead children. where are you going, we're not done
Back in 2018, I was shown a grave marked by a stone without an inscription, which the guide described as “the resting place for what left this island as several men and returned as a collection of spare parts”.
Some historians used to claim people didn't much care about small children before about 1900. I always thought the evidence for that was poor, and that against very strong. Gravestones have never been cheap.
by the way, BABY and PHILIP here are in a family lot with eight people, and four of them were children that died before the age of 3. another was a 21 year old woman.
One thing I try to do every so often is to lay wildflowers on the graves of people who passed a century or more ago, because they are graves of people who passed from the memory of the people who knew them.
It feels like someone should lay a flower on the grave to keep them unforgotten.
there's a children's walk in the local cemetary that people still leave dolls and flowers at all the time.
some of the graves are fairly recent! like kids were dieing of infections and polio up untill pretty recently.
The Economist podcast recently had an obit of a guy my mom’s age (70s) who lived his life in an iron lung.
If you don’t want to vaccinate your kids, go ask your mom or grandmoms for an opinion on childhood disease.
Shit, my dad's cousin had polio. He survived, but couldn't walk again. These are RECENT diseases and we eradicated them and it fucking kills me that we're bringing them back due to our own ignorance and hubris.
People had just stopped dying of polio when I started school - I think I was in the first year to get the polio vaccine via "sip" in NZ. There was a boy in my class who had a withered leg due to polio nerve damage
My uncle used to take me and my cousins on cemetery tours to learn family history and seeing SO many infant graves really stuck with me. Like seeing proof that my great-grandma, who cooked my breakfast that day, "had two kids" but ACTUALLY had five, but only two lived past the age of 3 changed me.
my aunt had a tiny headstone in the baby graves section of the cemetery for a child she lost very young
she never had any other children and i remember how inconsolable she was for weeks on end when that cemetery ran out of adult plots and dug up the baby graves without any notification
they had stopped burying children in a special area of the cemetery at some point in the 1940s. Somewhere in the late '80s they unceremoniously dug that section up with bulldozers and made a mass grave in a far corner for whatever remains they uncovered.
the people who hold these views think that natural selection is inherently just, and any attempt to deter it is to defy your predestiny, but they simultaneously believe their fate cannot include such horrors.
My great-great-great grandpa built this entire chapel by hauling big stones up a hill on his back in thanks to God for not taking all his kids with diphtheria - he *only* lost three. He was grateful because it could have been worse.
