The Golden State Warriors need to cut Andrew Wiggins. They need to do it today. They need to state clearly why: because he won’t take his vaccine.
...And then they should be made an example of him. Nobody, no one individual, in any workplace—especially during this time—is irreplaceable. You treat others like they’re disposable with your actions, and you get the same treatment back.
Or, do what Larry Flynt's Hustler Club in Vegas did in May, make the vaccine mandatory, report your wins (a 100% employee vaccination rate), and host a pop-up vaccine event to celebrate. (It should surprise no one that sex workers are on the front lines of the anti-antivaxxer movement btw.)
Yes, Warriors, be more like the Hustler Club.
At some point, the memification of antivaxxers and all the other things (including columns like this one) defeat their own purpose. They take away from the task at hand. For starters, even trolling invites antivaxxers to the table; it creates friction, and discourse, and debate where there should be none.
Even negativity (especially negativity) gives them oxygen. Nobody, zero (0) individuals from any professional sports franchise or business with 100 employees or more, needs to explain why it's necessary that an employee not do what Andrew Wiggins is doing.
...Nobody needs to roll out the shopworn truths about how vaccines work. Nobody needs to make an analogy or use a metaphor or talk in platitudes about why we’re in this together. Nobody needs to remind everyone in the room that in order to get into Kindergarten or bring a puppy home, there need to be shots.
Vaccination: it’s the law of the land. Period.
Vaccines are not new things. Vaccines are not bad things. Vaccines are why the people who argue against vaccines—are here, alive, walking around spewing their spew in the fucking first place.
All this stuff has been said before. All the hand-wringing and convincing have been tried in the last century all the way up to today, and it hasn’t worked because the cohort of people you're trying to convince—is broken.
I was wrong in thinking that after thirteen months of purgatory and worse—that saying if we produce this miracle shot and hoard them in such great quantities that the rest of the world suffers, that WE can go back to normal. I though that would do something, you know appealing to our collective selfish late-capitalist instincts and all that. It did the opposite. It made them dig in more. Setting deadlines, talking sense, showing concern, finding a way out—does nothing. It puts them on the defensive; it creates more friction.
Hey folks, you can have a shot and all the things, or you can be a selfish prick and spew your nonsense from your little bloated-face picture bubble online to someone who hated you since high school anyway and stick the rest of us in Jigsaw’s basement for all time. Your choice.
Guess what they chose.
If there’s anything that has bound us together during this pandemic, it’s not the appeal to our better angels; it’s not the looking out for the guy next to you and the guy next to that that you don’t see. We don’t care, clearly. We don’t care to the magnitude of 680,000 empty seats at Thanksgiving. We don’t care about the magnitude of all the war deaths of the last century combined.
What people do care about are status and money.
So start taking those things away. Immediately.
No, we don’t need to hear Andrew Wiggins’ side either. Thus far all the “other sides” have been the same fucking talking point, “it’s a decision for me, or between me and my god.” No it’s not.
Tell that to my seven-year-old son, who just got off three days of at-home COVID protocol for the second time in as many weeks. Tell that to the parents of the children in ICUS. Tell that to the families of the teachers, and hospital workers, and clinicians, and social workers, and grocery clerks, and delivery persons, and farm laborers who’ve died over the last year.
…Tell it, in other words, to someone who doesn’t see you as the world’s biggest fucking entitled piece of shit walking around unencumbered and making others sick in your wake.
We don’t need to give Wiggins & co. one nanosecond behind the mic to contaminate a room. He should be summarily removed from the conversation, as should Washington State head coach Nick Rolovich—an antivaxxer who every day he holds a job in violation of the Apple State's protocol. As should flat-Earther Kyrie Irving and his cryptic stance on the matter. As should Cam Newton and his personal decision not to get vaccinated. As should the remaining 15 percent of MLB players who haven’t been vaccinated and the nine percent of NFL athletes who haven’t been vaccinated. They should be outed, fired, and made example of.
If the Warriors don’t take action, Wiggins will likely be granted a religious exemption from the NBA, albeit, the San Francisco city government can override that exemption.
The religious exemption thing is frankly bullshit, or at least it’s being turned into a giant dung pile by folks who want to do an end-around around regulations. An estimated 2,600 Los Angeles Police Department employees are citing religious objections to try to get out of their mandatory vaccine.
Hospital staff in Arkansas are doing the same thing.
All across the country, in the wake the White House vaccine mandates on Sept. 9 covering more than 100 million Americans—many are now flouting orders and obfuscating regulations, and putting employers in the unenviable position of determining what an actual religious belief is and what is a way to further shirk one’s responsibility to one’s former man.
...Which is ironic because most tenets of all religion are precisely about the opposite of that, being kind and good and forbearing to one another—especially the most helpless among us.
That’s why in New York, state lawmakers are attempting to make the vaccine mandatory with no religious exemptions—although, on Tuesday, a federal judge blocked the state from enforcing such a rule.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, pastor Jackson Lahmeyer is offering a “religious exemption” form on his church’s website for download, along with links for suggested donations to the church. He (surprise!) is also running for the U.S. Senate as a Republican.
As it stands, if Wiggins does not get vaccinated, he will not be allowed to participate in Warriors home games, and that makes it a simple decision for Golden State: those who choose not to perform their jobs shouldn’t be paid to do so. If he needs more motivation than employment at this point, maybe he can call up his former Timberwolves teammate Karl-Anthony Towns who has lost six immediate family members to COVID-19, and see how he feels about it.
He won't, though. None of them will. They're wrong. They're on the wrong side of history. They're finishing the job of turning this republic into everyone's worst nightmare. And that's exactly where they want to be.
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