Flashback: So much for progress — Parents buy into Internet rumors, refuse to get kids inoculated

Vials of COVID vaccine, Roseland Hospital, Jan. 5, 2022

    Can you be proud of your prescience and embarrassed by your shortsightedness at the same stroke?  Sure. I was reading about how the measles are taking hold in this country once again, thanks to the idiots we elected, and wondered if I'd been ahead of the game, and I was — this 2008 column that starts out scolding the anti-vaccine crowd, a reminder that it was ignorance that conjured Trump out of the cellars of the American id. He didn't make us stupid, merely reaped the harvest. A symptom, not a cause. Then a celebration of my friend, Harry Heftman, using his thinning cohort as a guide. And THEN — this was back when my column filled a page — perhaps the most heartfelt apology I've ever delivered in the paper, ending with my usual daily joke. I've kept the original subheadings.

OPENING SHOT ...

     The word "vanity" has two different yet related meanings: "admiration for oneself," which, fittingly, is the more popular sense today. And the older meaning of "fruitlessness," of being in vain, the sense intended when the Bible says, in Ecclesiastes, "omnis vanitas" -- "all is vanity" -- a comment on the ultimate meaninglessness of human achievement.
     In the long term, that is. In the short term, human endeavor performs some neat tricks. Take inoculation against childhood diseases. Each year, hundreds of thousands of children don't die of measles, diphtheria and a host of once-widespread, now-forgotten fatal ailments, all because of the inoculations they get before entering school.
     These scourges are so forgotten, in fact, that an alarming number of parents are refusing to get their kids inoculated. Moved by the myths flying around cyberspace and puffed-up in the self-regard — the vanity — brought on by believing they are party to secret, suppressed knowledge, they court actual, deadly perils for their children and their communities in an attempt to avoid hazy hypothetical risks.
     A few lines after "vanity of vanities" comes another relevant line: "There is no remembrance of former things." Human knowledge progresses, but humans, alas, remain the same.

THE LAST MAN STANDING

     They first went to work around 1920, as Chicago's newsboys and bootblacks. In 1922, Sophie Morrin, only 13, started in a hairpin factory to help out her struggling Polish immigrant family. In 1924, Margaret Larkin, 15, landed herself a plum job as a long-distance telephone operator
     Others delivered telegrams, served in restaurants, worked in shops.

With Harry Heftman, at his hot dog stand

     For the next 75 years or so, the Chicagoans born in 1909 labored at their chosen professions. In factories and offices and department stores, or at more-exotic trades. Gene Krupa was bashing his drum kit at the Three Deuces in 1927. In 1929, a street tough named Barney Ross had his first paid fight, beating Ramon Lugo in six rounds. The elegant Katherine Dunham danced in Ruth Page's ballet "La Guiablesse" in 1933. In 1935, Jennie Dee Gustafson worked as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. In 1939, Elmer Balaban opened his Esquire Theater on Oak Street.
     The Second World War came and went. Children were born, grew up, left home. The kids of 1909 slowed down in the 1960s, and by the 1980s age put a hand on their shoulders and began claiming them, one by one.
     Band leader Benny Goodman died in 1986. In 1992, Billy Herman, who played second base for the Cubs in three World Series, passed on.
     Fewer and fewer remained at their posts. In 1994 Dr. Max Berg retired from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he had held a clinical professorship for 60 years.
     Until now, when there is only one left — I'm going out on a limb here, but I think it's a safe bet that just one Chicagoan born in 1909 still shows up for work every day. And that Chicagoan, you may already guess if you are a regular reader, is Harry Heftman, who on March 15 celebrated his 99th birthday. He was persuaded by his family to take a week off in February, but he's back now, doing what he loves where he has been doing it for more than half a century, doling out franks and time-tested wisdom at Harry's Hot Dogs on the corner of Randolph and Franklin. Happy birthday, Harry.

CORRECTION

     Last week, marking the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, Editor & Publisher looked back at what major American newspapers thought about the war when it began. A third were against it from the start. Two-thirds, however, including this newspaper, supported the war with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
     That inspired me to see what I had had written about it five years ago. I knew I had been in favor of toppling Saddam Hussein. Remove a tyrant and an enemy, I thought. Use America's might for good.
     But I didn't quite remember my stand-on-a-chair-and-whoop enthusiasm. I began, in January that year, by quoting Edmund Burke about how evil triumphs if good men do nothing, and sneering at peace protesters who, to be honest, didn't help their cause by being so far over the top — they thought Bush was an idiot and a killer long BEFORE the war.
     My initial post-war column went to bat for female soldiers -- the right-wing, anti-feminist crowd at home was questioning whether women should fight in combat. No shame there. Then, on April 11, I let loose a bleat of contentment over the situation that, frankly, has me shaking my head in amazement.
     "How could you not be proud and happy?" I babbled, "very, very pleased" that the U.S. not only won but "we did it in high style."
      I suppose I could try to mitigate the sin — I wasn't alone in being gulled by this. And I did have a few doubts about "the moment of apparent victory." In that same column, I noted, "The war could linger on. Islamic fanatics, angered and humiliated to see the mighty Saddam crumple like a toddler hit by a cinderblock, could find new opportunities to inflict terror." But that's no excuse. I'm a humorist at heart, a silly, inconsequential man who should limit himself to exploring candy factories and pig farms and shouldn't be allowed to comment on weighty public matters. Four thousand Americans soldiers — and counting – died because of that exact kind of lazy, smug, complacent, detached, Pollyannaish non-thinking. The president might not have any regrets, but I do. I regret the error and apologize, for what little it's worth.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE ...

     Bob Evans of Woodstock says he has liked this oldie since he was a kid:
     Alphie: It says here in the newspaper that the Earth will be dragged from its orbit and be consumed by the sun in 7 billion years.
     Betty: In 7 million years, the Earth will die?
     Alphie: No, it says 7 BILLION.
      Betty: Whew! That's a relief.

     

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 23, 2008