From Jeff Childers

Could someone explain something to me? I’ve been increasingly puzzled by the apparent paradox that the exact same people who were so terrified of a bad cold they cancelled their lives, wore masks in the car, and were willing to take a bunch of experimental injections, but who are now perfectly ducky with the notion of global thermonuclear annihilation. Doesn’t trouble them a bit.

One of my pre-pandemic friends recently retired from a career working in holistic medicine. He was anti-vaxx his entire life. None of his kids ever got ANY childhood vaccines. Notwithstanding that, during the pandemic he went covid crazy. He and his wife took all the shots. They didn’t go out to a restaurant or into a store until the summer of ’22. She got, and survived, an aggressive cancer.

We were talking politics and I asked him recently about whether he ever considered the risk of nuclear war. “You know, it’s weird, I just don’t worry about that. There’s already enough to worry about,” he answered. He’s all-in for Ukraine, though. He wants the U.S. to get more directly involved.

I can’t square it. It seems like some people can fear only what they’re told to fear.