August Musings

I’m feeling thoughtful about the entries for August that you’ll find on my “Inspirations of the Month” page. Buddhist and Hindu celebrations, African American heroes, the commemorations of the only nuclear weapons used in war so far. All that bookended by a 1966 LGBTQ uprising three years before Stonewall and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Heady stuff – some of the worst and best of us humans, all to remember in a few weeks time.

Pondering those events, being in a historical frame of mind, I find myself saddened by the failure of so many people to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, especially with the Delta variant running wild. We could have ended this slaughter and long-term disabling of people many months ago. We could have stopped this virus from mutating into the Delta variant at all, in fact.

Those of us called ‘baby boomers’ stepped up right away for vaccination, not because we are brainwashed old fogies but because we lived through the last, the LAST polio epidemic to sweep the US. That virus, the one that put President Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair when he was young, was stopped because we got vaccinated. We get it. We got the shots then and we get them now. I got the shots and couldn’t have acted any other way.

Why? For myself, sure, but also for all those in my community who cannot take vaccines for medical reasons. I will not have on my conscience, even hypothetically, the thought that my carelessness or lack of community spirit caused the suffering or death of someone else. Part of being a citizen is, to me, to act for the public good. Sadly, that idea seems to be dying in America.

I understand why some people of color have been hesitant. Black and brown people have been cruelly treated and even experimented upon by the medical profession in this country. Access to high quality health care is, sadly, all too often a privilege of the affluent or white. I’ve been encouraged by the positive results of vaccine outreach programs led by respected community members in LatinX and African American neighborhoods to persuade the hesitant.

But, white folks, especially the 18 to 40ish ones, lag far behind in this effort toward community protection. Their reluctance is a slap in the face to all the exhausted health care workers struggling to keep desperately sick people alive. Those unvaccinated people are the reason the Delta variant is engulfing this country.

This virus will only continue to mutate into more lethal and more contagious variants until most of us are no longer susceptible – either because we are vaccinated or have survived COVID-19 or we are killed by it. Which way would you rather participate?