Tribune. The modern processions that are the demonstrations hostile to the sanitary pass gathered Saturday, July 31, 204,090 people. In a secularized society, the demand for public freedoms replaces the invocation of divine mercy by penitents during the great epidemics of the past.
The affirmation of rights and personal convictions, including against the evidence and constraints imposed by the pandemic dynamic, would be the path to salvation, safeguarding the democratic principles set up as rules of faith. This recourse to the religious register to try to interpret our secular beliefs and practices in times of pandemic, can be applied to the republican anointing that vaccination would represent and to the viaticum that the health pass becomes.
Has not the Head of State invested himself with a hieratic function to want, in the secrecy of the deliberations of the health security council, to decide everything? Including by betting against scientific expertise, believing that he was infallible and exempted himself from any critical judgment with regard to his choices.
We did not produce a thought and a policy up to new and complex challenges, the outcome of which does not depend only on the biomedical capacities to produce a vaccine and on the international resolution to make it accessible to all. If incantatory speeches have no hold on reality, it is because they lack the capacity for analysis and synthesis, and that establishing immediate diagnoses is not enough to give credibility to a strategy and mobilize a society that substituted defiance for faith.
Vaccinated protesters
Lack of a collective story that allows us to understand us, to situate ourselves and to be recognized in our rightful place in order to contribute, in responsibility, to a long-term commitment. But what seems to be just as lacking is the statement of rules of governance respectful of our ethical attachment to principles that questionable decisions are likely to flout.
The demand for reform of a method that is refuted by those who protest in the streets against what they consider to be a form of unreasonable arbitrariness, must be taken seriously, respected in what it expresses and considered as a warning. Is it worth remembering that many demonstrators claim to be vaccinated? They can not therefore be assimilated to this informal community of irredentists or factions that some stigmatize wrongly?
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