Ignorance is but a raging Bull

I tie my shoes and head out the door. As the wooden crease of it's side meets the house's frame and seals itself into place, I wait patiently. 1, 2, 3... The door wooshes open with the force of a woman much larger than my mother's small 5 foot 7 frame would suggest. She yells to me from the doorway; "Remember to tell them to call me to come pick you up when it's time for your shot!". I look up, nod, turn around and sigh in disdain. Here we go again. It's annual vaccination day at my high school - today my classmates will be receiving their HPV shots, ensuring that, unlike our parents generations, we'll have a shot at lowering the rates of this disease, which carries with it increased rates of ovarian cancer and cysts - while I, on the other hand, will be going home. It's become an annual tradition. My mother's ignorance grows, and I'm forced to go along with it due to my age, despite the development of my own critical thinking skills. For the past couple of years I've watched with frustration as my science teachers explained the benefits of our annual vaccination requirements at school only to have to go home to my mother's incessant - and unsubstantiated - anti-vaccination ramblings. My father used to say that ignorance is like a raging Bull, fighting it's way into our minds with force and stubbornness, hoping to keep up a facade of strength at all costs. My mother, he said, carried these characteristics with pride and though exciting at first, he soon got tired of arguing with someone who could never admit to being wrong, no matter the evidence, no matter the conversation. He left her and to this day, I have never been able to view her through a new lense. If ignorance is a Bull, my mother is a matador, constantly indulging in it's rage. So today is the day. The grand annual tradition in which I will be picked up from school early, without getting my vaccine, and have to walk down the hallway with my mother by my side, passing by the sea of prying eyes and the hushed whispers of disapproval. I'll keep my head down in embarrassment but it won't matter. My mother's head will be held high and I'll appear like an accessory to her ignorance, despite my opposing views. I'll wish I could protest against her and stay, knowing I'd never get away with it. And it'll fucking suck. My mom will get home and put on some conspiratory video by some right wing dilettante with non-existent critical thinking skills and a penchant for manipulation and I'll voice my disapproval only to be met with an onslaught of "facts" about the correlation between vaccines and infertility, autism, early death and more... I'll sigh and go to my room, defeated and exhausted by the prospect of trying to argue with someone who favours the logic of 4chan idiots to the scientific findings of infectious disease specialists. Maybe it was her upbringing that led her to be this way. A childhood filled with natural remedies and a healthy dose of medical distrust. Maybe it was all the information she indulged in in her online groups, unsure of who else to turn to when the people in her life rightfully opposed her dangerous views. Upbringing and confirmation bias aside, she remains set in her ways like a stone statue, blinded or unwilling to see the harm of her ignorance.

Ignorance is but a raging Bull, blowing past compassion and common sense on it's path of brute force and selfishness.