How dare you?

How dare you deface this sacred symbol with your crybaby nonsense? You made a choice to refuse a vaccine that countless health professionals from all over the political spectrum say you should get.

I’m cool with your choice. It’s a free country, after all.

This month, many jurisdictions will see vaccination requirements of some sort kick in. While many people believe this is an entirely new tyranny, I wonder where their kids were when they were required to attend public school. Surely they weren’t all home-schooled?

We’ve had vaccine requirements since before I was born — this is not new. Further, I understand some of the reluctance to get the vaccine; I would’ve preferred to go without, too. But I live in an imperfect world and enough highly-educated health care professionals are telling me to get vaccinated. So I’m vaccinated.

I chose to be vaccinated.

You can choose to remain unvaccinated and you can either accept the consequences or you can complain like there’s no tomorrow.

But how dare you vandalize the holy image of this yellow star?

You chose not to get a vaccine. Yes, you might be refused entrance to a restaurant but there are other restaurants that will welcome you. You might not be able to attend church or a concert but you should know by now that your choices have consequences.

You chose not to get a vaccine.

You were not fired or prevented from working because of who you are — if you did lose your job, you had a choice.

You were not kept out of restaurants or theaters because of who you are — you had a choice.

You did not have your business ransacked and looted before it was confiscated by the government.

You did not have your place of worship set alight as the fire department watched and laughed, making sure neighboring structures didn’t burn. You did not have to watch while holy objects from within your church were desecrated in the street. You did not see your grandparents’ graves vandalized and violated.

You were not forcibly loaded aboard cattle cars along with your children, denied food and water, one bucket serving as a toilet for dozens of people on a journey to hell. You didn’t arrive, freezing, stinking and terrified at camps where thugs in Hugo Boss uniforms decided you would live or die with the flick of a wrist.

You did not see an S.S. officer hold your infant child by its hind leg and bash its head against the steel of a truck when the child wouldn’t stop crying.

You weren’t forced to hold your infant child up in front of you so the barbarian about to kill you could get you and your child with one bullet.

You didn’t see your family forcibly separated from you, your spouse and children sent to a killing chamber disguised as a shower, where gas caused people to claw atop each other in attempts to find air to breathe that didn’t choke them. Your children weren’t found buried beneath the human mountain of death that remained once the poison had done its job.

You weren’t housed on wooden pallets, no comfort, no heat, in vast dorms of filth, with more than triple the number of human beings for which the space was designed. You weren’t given a scoop of dirty, lukewarm water — with hunk of turnip in it if you were lucky — for your daily meal. You weren’t forced to stand for hours in freezing rain while monsters obsessed with counting counted you, over and over.

You weren’t infested with lice and disease then denied even rudimentary health care.

You weren’t forced to work in a crematorium feeding body after ghoulish body into the hellish flames, sometimes recognizing a dead friend, neighbor or even child before you burnt them to ashes. You weren’t then forced to feed the funeral pyres when the ovens couldn’t keep up with that Teutonic efficiency.

You weren’t eventually liberated to find everything you once had gone — your home, your business, your family, maybe even your town.

The Judenstern represents a horror beyond what you can imagine. How dare you raise your pathetic “suffering” to the level of the Shoah — the most monstrous atrocity in human history.

You are free to complain, to cry, to declare how terribly unfair it all is. You are free to magnify your vaccine-free suffering as much as you like.

But you are also free to get the vaccine.

What you are not free to do is to hijack the sacred symbol of a people who had no choice, who know what true suffering is — the suffering of unspeakable sorrow, of unimaginable genocide.

How dare you equate your small suffering with the horror of the Shoah? How dare you take this liberty?

If you want to remain vaccine-free, so be it. Buck up and accept the consequences of your choice.

Do not create repugnant false equivalencies by elevating your self-imposed suffering with the Holocaust.