Eula May Quotes

The opportunity to think with another mind is my preferred mode of travel. ~ Eula Biss

as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." What ~ Eula Biss

In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot. ~ Eula Biss

While we routinely call for more vaccine testing, and more human trials, the unspoken assumption is that we do not intend our children to be the subjects of those trials. ~ Eula Biss

Our constitution got built around the idea of minority protection. ~ Eula Biss

I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it. ~ Eula Biss

We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other. ~ Eula Biss

I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long. ~ Eula Biss

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?" the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. "They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders." Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk. ~ Eula Biss

When I stepped onto the bridge over the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out. And I know now that my certainty was based on a series of troubling misconceptions, but it would be years before I would lose the comfort that certainty gave me. ~ Eula Biss

I come home to an empty house and fill the sink with water. The pigeons above the window are clucking. I let the dishes slip under the bubbles and I close my eyes. I listen to the perfect, whole, round sounds of glass against porcelain under water. ~ Eula Biss

We do not know alone. Dracula ~ Eula Biss

I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman. ~ Eula Biss

In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage. ~ Eula Biss

However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other's environment. Immunity is a shared space--a garden we tend together. ~ Eula Biss

The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children's book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere. ~ Eula Biss

That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished. ~ Eula Biss

The risk of getting Hep B from a blood transfusion is a tiny number, but it's a bigger number than the risk of side effects from the vaccine. ~ Eula Biss

I think that protecting children at the age where they're most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent. ~ Eula Biss

This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community. ~ Eula Biss

The release loop was tight, but I thought if I was drowning I would be able to pull anything. ~ Eula Biss

Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, that we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. 'There is, in fact, no white community,' as Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself. ~ Eula Biss

The belief that public health measures are not intended for people like us is widely held by many people like me. Public health, we assume, is for people with less - less education, less-healthy habits, less access to quality health care, less time and money. ~ Eula Biss

In this context, fear of toxicity strikes me as an old anxiety with a new name. Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world. This is not to say that concerns over environmental pollution are not justified - like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers - but that the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity. For the filth theorist, this meant a retreat into the home, where heavy curtains and shutters might seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity. ~ Eula Biss

If by years of patient suffering, God can manage to take the harshness out of my voice, then the time has been well-spent. ~ Eula Biss

We've been using vaccination in some form for hundreds of years now. We have almost nothing in our modern medicine that we've been using that long, and it's been consistently productive even though, you know, the older vaccines were much more dangerous than vaccines we're using now. ~ Eula Biss

I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject. ~ Eula Biss

My own thinking is often clarified and extended by talking with students. ~ Eula Biss

One of the mysteries of hep B immunization is that vaccinating only 'high risk' groups, which was the original public health strategy, did not bring down rates of infection. ~ Eula Biss

If your child's going to ride in a car or go swimming or play soccer, all of those things involve risk. And if your child doesn't do any of those things, then they're probably sitting too much, and that involves risk, too. ~ Eula Biss

Words like 'custody' don't mean the same thing to him. I don't want us to own anything together. "You don't want to be happy," he accuses me. ~ Eula Biss

A trust-in the sense of a valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong-captures, more or less, my understanding of what it is to have a child. ~ Eula Biss

He hears his mother and his sister-in-law talk about how lonely it is to be married to a musician, how many nights they spend alone. He wonders if I would be unhappy. I don't say anything. I like to spend my nights alone. ~ Eula Biss

I was shaking when I asked my mother, "Do you think you eat enough?" She was silent for a long time until she said quietly, "That is between me and God. ~ Eula Biss

In a section of The Vaccine Book titled "Is it your social responsibility to vaccinate your kids?" Dr. Bob asks, "Can we fault parents for putting their own child's health ahead of that of the kids around him?" This is meant to be a rhetorical question, but Dr. Bob's implied answer is not mine. In another section of the book, Dr. Bob writes of his advice to parents who fear the MMR vaccine, "I also warn them not to share their fears with their neighbors, because if too many people avoid the MMR, we'll likely see the disease increase significantly." I do not need to consult an ethicist to determine that there is something wrong there, but my sister clarifies my discomfort. "The problem is in making a special exemption just for yourself," she says. This reminds her of a way of thinking proposed by the philosopher John Rawls: Imagine that you do not know what position you are going to hold in society - rich, poor, educated, insured, no access to health care, infant, adult, HIV positive, healthy immune system, etc. - but that you are aware of the full range of possibilities. What you would want in that situation is a policy that is going to be equally just no matter what position you end up in. "Consider relationships of dependence," my sister suggests. "You don't own your body - that's not what we are, our bodies aren't independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making." She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rar ~ Eula Biss

Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity. For some of the mothers I know, a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seems to disrupt
a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent. ~ Eula Biss

My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories. ~ Eula Biss

I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague. ~ Eula Biss

But for now I prefer to think that I will go somewhere that is not so overimagined. ~ Eula Biss

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator. ~ Eula Biss

What I saw when I was doing research is that in pursuit of a middle ground, people will kind of split the difference between the two extremes that they're hearing. And I think what's problematic is that people are seeing vaccinating on schedule, on time, as an extreme position. ~ Eula Biss

Yes, there's a higher rate of people living below the poverty line who aren't vaccinated. But it's much rarer for that to be a product of choice than a product of circumstance. ~ Eula Biss

There's a cultural expectation that everyone will be immunized, in part to protect the entire population. When people refuse that expectation, they're indulging in a certain kind of political or social immunity. ~ Eula Biss

As for mercury, a child will almost certainly get more mercury exposure from her immediate environment than from vaccination. This is true, too, of the aluminum that is often used as an adjuvant in vaccines to intensify the immune response. ~ Eula Biss

If vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love. ~ Eula Biss

Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity ~ Eula Biss

But how we should care for other people remains a question. In his discussion of efforts to control childhood obesity, the philosopher Michael Merry defines paternalism as "interference with the liberty of another for the purposes of promoting some good or preventing some harm." This type of paternalism, he notes, is reflected in traffic laws, gun control, and environmental regulations. These are limits to liberty, even if they are benevolent. Interfering with the parenting of obese children, he argues, is not necessarily benevolent. There is risk in assigning risk. ~ Eula Biss