Unexpected encounter

For the past year, I’ve often encountered Sue, a local from Pawtucket, on my walks to Slater Park. She walks fast, takes pictures with her cell phone and can be very chatty. Over time, I learned that she has a pet conure and that she’s into fad diets. Yesterday, she asked why I’d been AWOL on the 10 Mile River Greenway and said she had been worried about me.

Yesterday, I learned far more about Sue than I cared to. She informed me that we’re all born perfect, and that our subsequent lives—diet, culture, etc.—are what causes all the evils we see. She doesn’t believe vaccines prevent disease, claiming that in her job as a hospital phlebotomist, she never once got sick.

In re: we’re born perfect, I asked her whether she thought Hitler and Stalin were born perfect. She informed me that Hitler was guiltless, never killed anyone and was “tricked” by Stalin*.

In re: vaccines and disease, I asked her if she knew anyone who had smallpox. When she acknowledged that she didn’t, I pointed out that (a) there was a time when everyone knew someone who either survived or died from smallpox** and (b) that smallpox has been eradicated worldwide only because of the vaccine.

I didn’t ask her how people born with the sickle cell mutation, the cystic fibrosis mutations, mutations in NF1, Duchenne, Becker and myotonic muscular dystrophy and Huntington disease, just to name a few genetic diseases, were “born perfect.” I didn’t ask her about antibiotics and how come we no longer see the Black Plague.

Her insistence that Hitler was not responsible for the deaths of millions of innocents was enough. I’m done with Sue.

*Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf” in 1924, in which he advocated a bloody end to European Jews and that Germany should seize the lands of Eastern Europe and Russia, enslaving or killing all the Slavs. Lenin only died in 1924, and Stalin didn’t come to power until the late 1920s. Hitler’s ideas were his own.

**George Washington had smallpox. He later required that soldiers in the Continental Army be inoculated.