True story--I can't find the link but I bet you can google it up. There was a Silicon Valley adjacent county in California that had had, for years, an abysmally low vaccination rate because by California Law parents can obtain exemptions from schools' vaxx requirements on PHILOSOPHICAL grounds. And, of course, the clean-eating crunchy granola smarm-mammas all had philosophical objections. Until Covid hit and there was massive publicity on anti-vaxx activism amongst hoi polloi. Then the vaccination rate climbed to normal figures.
It's especially interesting when the status of a belief or practice flips for no apparent reason. For college graduation our senior class voted to forgo caps and gowns and give the money to start a scholarship fund for 'black people from the Chicago ghetto'. At the graduation ceremony several white boys wore dashikis, one white girl wore a sari, and quite a few students in ethnic costume of unknown provenance. If those pictures come to light, white students who'd worn dashikis and blond Afros could be permanently ejected from polite society for cultural appropriation.
And then there are water bottles. When bottled water became de rigeur clean-eating people would buy it by the case in 20 oz bottles, standing on a 3' x 3' cardboard tray covered with taut plastic wrap. They viewed those of us who drank tap water and used public fountains as declasse--and dirty. Then it dawned on them that they were dumping immeasurable plastic into landfills. Here there was a good reason for the flip. But there was no reason why they should have started buying cases of bottled watered in the first place.
True story--I can't find the link but I bet you can google it up. There was a Silicon Valley adjacent county in California that had had, for years, an abysmally low vaccination rate because by California Law parents can obtain exemptions from schools' vaxx requirements on PHILOSOPHICAL grounds. And, of course, the clean-eating crunchy granola smarm-mammas all had philosophical objections. Until Covid hit and there was massive publicity on anti-vaxx activism amongst hoi polloi. Then the vaccination rate climbed to normal figures.
It's especially interesting when the status of a belief or practice flips for no apparent reason. For college graduation our senior class voted to forgo caps and gowns and give the money to start a scholarship fund for 'black people from the Chicago ghetto'. At the graduation ceremony several white boys wore dashikis, one white girl wore a sari, and quite a few students in ethnic costume of unknown provenance. If those pictures come to light, white students who'd worn dashikis and blond Afros could be permanently ejected from polite society for cultural appropriation.
And then there are water bottles. When bottled water became de rigeur clean-eating people would buy it by the case in 20 oz bottles, standing on a 3' x 3' cardboard tray covered with taut plastic wrap. They viewed those of us who drank tap water and used public fountains as declasse--and dirty. Then it dawned on them that they were dumping immeasurable plastic into landfills. Here there was a good reason for the flip. But there was no reason why they should have started buying cases of bottled watered in the first place.