“It’s just another vaccine”
Military members are mad, but no one is discussing why they are mad since it’s just another in the long list of vaccines.
*The writings, thoughts and opinions here in are the authors own and represent in no way any organization, group, or service that the author may or may not be a party to. To include any state, federal, or no government entity*
In an age of buzzwords, military members tend to have a natural immunity to them. Synchronicity, high performance team, circle back, optimization, pivot, deep dive, thought leader(lol) and my personal favorite piggy back. Find a veteran or officer that’s served on staff somewhere and repeat these words and await a reaction. Despite the inoculation through inundation, members didn’t react to the buzzwords of 2020/2021 in the same way, or maybe they didn’t react to them at all to begin with. Psychologists today say that buzzwords that corporate clad jargon could serve a few purposes; from the necessary military speak on a radio to membership of a professional community. Since the military is emphatic in its use of non-military buzzwords and makes a deliberate attempt to announce they are “corporatizing the force” my guess is it’s used to signal that one is a “professional”. So, this brings up an interesting proposition, when the facade of professionalism is gone, more specifically when the speaker loses their credibility, so too does their tribal jargon.
2020 & 21 gave us these beautifully overused terms and phrases such as “safe and effective”, “solidarity”, “preserve”, I could fill up a book, but the same reasons these buzzwords lost their punch among service members are the same reasons why they are still very upset. In today’s age we have both the internet and a 24 hour news cycle. Since the first death ticker went up on screen people have been able to Google not just what a reproductive rate was, but look up scholarly articles on the topics at hand. Service members have been able to do very simple math and see the threat posed to them and to their loved ones. They have been able to fact check without waiting on the social media provided fact checkers, and have further been able to fact check them.
Believe it or not, most service members do not get their news from Fox, OANN, CNN, or MSNBC. They are, brace yourselves, sentient beings able to type. So when the buzzwords are thrown at them at a rate higher than the .0047% chance of death they have, they don’t work. What’s worse, and this is the concerning part, is the uttering person loses credibility if they can’t produce a cogent counter to Staff Sergeant whoever’s argument.
This brings us to some disheartening realities, not only are people losing trust in the words, but people are loosing trust in the people, therefore the institutions, that say them.
So when a sergeant asks “are they really safe and effective” and the answer is “well yes the CDC and FDA said they are” which is quickly followed by “well what about the VAERS or WHO data” or “the same FDA and that was complicit to the ongoing opioid epidemic” answering them with “they are the experts you must trust” isn’t going to cut it. In that small quick example what that speaker has done aside from pissing off the sergeant, is diminish their standing, lessen the degree to which people will take them seriously, and lessen the degrees of respect given to that institution. This is part of the problem with tribalism.
Solidarity is another popular one, and uniquely interesting in the melting pot of service members. As much as services try to portray themselves as family, they are not those members' actual family. Members voluntarily submit to the mores and norms of military life, but people decided to make this vaccine issue political, and yes the both sides argument is valid here. When making something as simple as a vaccination political, and tying solidarity to it, what people who say this are doing is saying “we will be in solidarity….. with our opinion” while at the same time encouraging a further divergence from the solidarity they have with families, friends, and hometowns.
Pretending that these are black and white issues presented to the force is simplistic and wrong. As a society we need to step back and look at what is going on and how we are, each of us, affecting it.