What you see here are normal people.

I know, right? Normal by what standard? But if you were to grab 100 people from a motorway service station (the best melting pot location you'll find in modern Britain) chances are they'd look a lot like this. And perhaps even contain some of these opinions.

You can't just demonise them. Or write them off with pejoratives like "stupid" or "idiot". They are us. Like the frustrated motorist, they're not the traffic, we're all traffic.

I picked on the spelling on one of the signs in my original picture thread on Twitter. I regret this. It's a cheap shot. Greengrocer apostrophe's aren't my version of English. That doesn't mean they're nobody else's.

The phrase "the new normal" appeared on a lot of banners in the square. The irony did not escape me.

And that sparked me thinking about other issues at play here.

Is the anger directed at these people really more to do with their perceived rejection of evidence and science? Are we really cross that someone has an opinion about vaccination per se, or that they aren't doing the legwork they should to get a more solid answer from detailed academic papers?

You have to be really careful with this one. We make judgements based on the best information available to us at the time. And 'available' can't do that much work here. I remember taking two of my kids for separated MMR jabs (at huge expense) because of the FUD surrounding the Wakefield scandal. I now know that it was a scandal with the benefit of hindsight and a far better scicomms network. Back then, I didn't. I was pretty sure that MMR wouldn't do any harm, but if I could buy out even a tiny percentage risk from my own pocket? Well, rational reader, I did.

Or a few months ago – tearfully lining up the kids in a terrified chain gang of shopping-washing. We didn't know very much about fomites, or science. And maybe we still don't know all that much. But we were on our knees doing the scrubbing, fighting off the scary stuff by the only means available to us.

Be careful who you call stupid, or informed, or normal.

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