How Does The Onion Even Keep Up?

One of my favorite skits from the first season of Comedy Central’s Key and Peele involves President Obama meeting with Republican leaders and sending them into a complete tailspin complete with wild hysterics as he proposes policies they would be expected to agree with only to have them reflexively oppose him. It’s looking as if the President may actually be forced to do something similar, as even the most common sense suggestions from the White House continue to face reflexive opposition by the Republican Party.

The latest example involves an interview the President gave which aired Sunday night, in which he urged parents to vaccinate their children. This call comes on the heels of a measles outbreak, which has spread to 14 states, connected to unvaccinated children visiting Disneyland. With that as background, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up Monday morning and read this headline—Chris Christie breaks with Obama on vaccines. While Christie's actual remarks don’t exactly call for parents not to vaccinate their children, he does stress “balance” between “whatever the perceived danger is by vaccine” against “what risk to public health is.”

While it is almost comical that a presumptive presidential contender is entertaining a debate on this topic in an effort to pander to some theoretical base, it does speak to a deeper problem in our culture. Many of the problems facing us such as climate change, rebuilding our infrastructure, and promoting public health rely on trust and faith in institutions. If something as basic as vaccinating our children against deadly infectious disease receives this type of pushback, what does that say about the prospects for other issues that will involve trade-offs and sacrifices? So yes, Chris Christie probably just sunk his election prospects (to the extent that they ever really existed), but this is also just one more data point in a trend that honestly has me worried/depressed/disgusted.