Thread by @AlexandraErin

Here's a thing I keep thinking about: I keep getting told things like we can't shame people into getting vaccines, that people need an end to mask requirements and other restrictions as a reward, etc.

But we got whole towns of people to agree that mowing a lawn is necessary?

"Americans just aren't willing to accept sacrifice or inconvenience or discomfort or hard work for the sake of community."

But... lawns. Decades of people tending them. Watering them. Cutting them. Seeding them. Sodding them. Occasionally painting them.

Women started shaving sundry body hair and people of all genders started wearing antiperspirant deodorant because of advertising campaigns.

Alka Seltzer doubled a sale of its same basic product people had been taking 1 of by writing a jingle to tell the same people to take two.

But it couldn't affect property values until after people cared about it? Like, there's not a state of nature in which a lawn not kept to Suburban Americana Standards lowers property values, thereby teaching us the harsh lesson of tending to them?

https://twitter.com/thewapuche/status/1478952421363752960

And I know that part of the puzzle here is that there wasn't a well-funded, well-organized, and utterly ruthless counter-lobby that was willing to go scorched earth in reflexive opposition to any of these campaigns of propaganda and/or social pressure.

Like, I don't believe that Alka-Seltzer's "take two/Plop, plop, fizz, fizz" campaign would work if they did it today and the Tucker Carlsons of the world decided it was worthwhile to pretend that Big Seltzer was a communist front.

But that just makes all the "You have to understand, human nature, we can't shame people into this, they wouldn't trust an informational campaign, you can lead a horse to water," etc., stuff seem insincere and punch-pulling to me.

The problem, in short, isn't human nature. The problem remains Republican obstructionism.

And to be clear, I know that I personally have no power to shame people into getting vaccines. I'm working on convincing the reflexes that connect to my typing fingers of that. I just question the idea that society as a whole has no power to shape behaviors and attitudes.