House in the woods

And fresh snow on Falterona extra

I was chopping wood earlier, wood that I'd already chopped once but that needed breaking down and hauling to the balcony woodpile for easy access. What with the cold weather on the way.

Doing this I fell into what could be called a conversation with a guy who passed by, someone I know vaguely, who wanted to tell me why he was No Vax. He is a mercurial kind of guy, likeable. clever, and not afriad of his own opinions. I went inside after he had delivered his piece and wrote some of it down.

A passing No Vax man

He stopped and said again that he is not vaccinated and has no intention of being vaccinated. The reasons why not were many. That Omicron was really just flu and flu was no longer the way it used to be, almost as if saying back in the good old days when we all got it. And a bit of culling was necessary given how many of us there on this plant.
 
That the vaccines were not like the old vaccines; that we don’t know what their long-term consequences might be; that he had looked after himself and that he lived in harmony with nature, for better or worse, because nature was perfect in its goodness and badness.
 
That leaving people to die separated from their loved ones, like a dog, was unconscionable.
 
That the obligation to do this and to do that, the pile of decrees from the government, was another part of reducing the beautify of human existence to a number, to a bureaucratic and cold procedure.
 
That the vaccine was an example of the industrialization of healthcare with impersonal doctors and medics who were in it for themselves, who made you consent to absolving them of responsibility, which you wouldn’t accept if you were buying a car spare.  That he didn’t trust doctors and the healthcare system, that they want to get you in hospital and cut you up, take this out, put that in, while they drop cigarette ash in your wounds.
 
He is a forceful character, a Nietzschian force of nature, someone who sees himself as strong and oppositional with a clean body and clean mind who stands separate from the weak and vulnerable. He’s in his sixties.
 
At the same time he said that the vaccine was OK to be given to protect the old, the vulnerable but why should I pollute my body to ward off nothing worse than the flu. He has not had Covid although one of his sons has.
 
He harked back to the struggles fought for rights and freedoms as if to say they/we did it for this? So that we can be told by distant politicians and self-serving professional and bureaucrats what to do with our lives.
 
Under this you could see an appeal to a more traditional society, a time when people could be happy in a beautiful world that was more harmonious and more immediately controllable.  Round here that peasant self-sufficiency is not so historically distant although its manifestation through the hated system of mezzadria sharecropping was one of the reasons why hundreds of thousands fled the land when the possibility of a steady industrial wage became a possibility in the booming industries and cities of 1950s Italy.

He has also been or is a kind of healer himself, he works with the body’s energies to rebalance and heal, he defined himself a something-therapist that I couldn’t catch.
 
The new decree in Italy that all over 50s must now get vaccinated if they have not done so poses a dilemma for him.
 
I felt some sympathy for some of what he said, the notion of the alienation from big government, from an encroaching bureaucracy, from robotization and an impersonal medical machine, the commodification of everything, shades of Habermas and Schumacher,
 
But there is also this big man, I’m alright Jack, Nietzschian, Malthusian invulnerability and will to power and the devil take the weak and vulnerable so long as they are not ‘i miei cari’ – my loved ones.
 
Maybe that comes at a certain age as big men try and outrun death. There is another guy in the village, much older, who has said much the same in terms of Covid sorting the strong from the weak, the grain from the chaff.
 
For he did seem very aware of death, that each day was a step nearer, which led into some weird stuff about extraterrestrials and the sins of the dead being manifested in a poor afterlife.
 
He was forcefully articulate, he was preaching, there was not much room for listening . Maybe there is a weird kind of hyper-individualism at play, alienation as the assertion of my personal island-like sovereign liberty, you can take your choking destructive modern world and stuff it (as he sat in his car).