Is our love of technology creating low vaccine rate?
Re: Region delays Step 2 reopening  June 25  Now that Waterloo Region has been fitted with the proverbial COVID dunce cap and left behind to rue its misfortune while other municipalities progress to greater freedoms, it might be worth our time to assess how we got here. The immediate reasons are legion, ranging from vaccine supply and rollout issues to the agitations of local free thinkers who couldnt be bothered to vaccinate, but much of the groundwork, I would suggest, was laid earlier. A region drawn insatiably to the lure of mobile technology and its relentless mediation of reality was never particularly well prepared to deal with a crisis that re-establishes the priority of human relationships, concern for the other, and a willingness to abandon our curated spaces of personal autonomy and self-determination. We have for too long invested our time and talents, to say nothing of our civic pride, in the project of techno-solutionism and its associated accretion of materiality  all at the expense of something rather more ineffable that writers of another age designated as soul.