Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children
The state’s elimination of vaccine mandates is a courageous first step toward decluttering itself of any excess kids.
By Alexandra Petri, The Atlantic
Sorry. We decided there were too many children.You know how it goes.
Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks. They do this over and over again.
And the state of Florida, understandably, said: Enough. This needs to stop. We have decided that there are too many children, and we can let some of them go. Or, as the state’s surgeon general put it when he eliminated all vaccine mandates yesterday: “Who am I as a government or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body? I don’t have that right.”
(That relaxed attitude about bodily autonomy comes as something of a surprise, given the state’s six-week abortion ban…
