Soapbox

Rite of Passage

It was a solemn occasion, I realized.

Yesterday Ted and I drove an hour south to Logan to get our first Covid-19 vaccine injection from a pharmacy there that started booking appointments for our age group before local ones did. It was a sunny day and an easy drive so we decide to just get it done.

That morning I dressed more carefully than usual. I chose a colorful shirt, my nicest jeans and my good black suede boots. I even put on a little bit of eye make-up.
I laughed at myself as I was doing it, joking that we are all such shut-ins these days with so few chances to go anywhere that I was even dressing up to spend 5 seconds getting a shot. How silly!
I even moved my wallet into my best small purse.

On the drive down, chatting quietly and listening to music, I found myself oddly touched with- awe, I guess, over what we were doing. The two of us, embarking together on our part of this step to… change the world.
I took Ted’s hand and said how amazing it actually is that humans, many of whom are too stupid to come in our of the rain, have been able to unlock both the secret of how something as tiny as a virus works and causes illness, and figure out how to stop them. Polio. Smallpox. And now Covid-19.
In a year the best minds in the world solved the puzzle and in doing so, changed the world.
And now we were about to be part of the change: part of the growing herd of “Humans Who Do Not Have to Hide in Our Houses Because the Covid Virus Will Not Harm Us.”
Incredible.

And I realized that this was why I had dressed with such care that morning. It wasn’t that I am such a shut-in that even going to get a shot felt like an outing. It’s that this was actually a very solemn occasion. One dresses nicely for the rituals of life.

The last time I got dressed up was last April when I went to the crematorium to collect my cousin Margaret’s ashes. I knew I would speak to only 2 other people there, and we would both be masked and standing on opposite sides of the room, but, with no funeral or memorial service possible for her at that time… well, it was kind of her funeral. One shows respect by dressing nicely for a funeral, and so I did.

Yesterday, although we just sat in an almost empty room, got our temperstures checked, arms swabbed and then (after a 15 minute wait to make sure we weren’t going to have an anaphylatic reaction to the serum) sent on our way, we were taking part in a rite of passage, of sorts. One that, at that very moment, people all across the globe were taking part in, or waiting for their turn to take part in.

 

Except of course for the agitators, bioterrorists and just plain fools who will not: because freedom! Because conspiracies (it implants a government tracking device!) and ignorance ( it will alter your DNA and you won’t be human!) and just general “if those people made it: if they are for it then I won’t take it, even if deep inside I know it will save my life” cussedness.
It’ll be hard to get herd immunity when 40% of the herd refuses to get immune and instead rips off their masks and goes to bars and gyms and parties while Covid-19 is still out there killing people at a somewhat reduced but still alarming rate.

The people who never criticized the Orange Idiot (who said that windmills cause cancer and maybe we should drop a little nuke in hurricanes to blow them apart and Covid is just like the flu and it will magically disappear soon) when he basically ignored the pandemic, allowing it to claim hundreds of thousands of lives, are now criticizing Joe Biden because people are still dying.
As if “red” states lifting all Covid restrictions in the name of “not letting the government tell us what to do” has no part in that. As if the Covidiot mask-deniers who charge maskless into stores that require masks and attack staff and patrons who try to remove them aren’t trying to undo all the good the new administration is doing. (We’d rather die than let a Democrat help us!)

Thanks to the Biden Covid team, we are now on track to have enough vaccine to innoculate *every* adult in America by the end of May!! The trick is getting it done, of course. That’s a big job and the $7B earmarked to help state and local authorities set up and staff more vaccination sites is being blocked by the Republicans who… want more people to die, I guess. (What other explanation is there? They also tried to yank health insurance from millions of people during a pandemic so clearly their “Pro-life” policy doesn’t extend to any actual, living people)

But those of us with functioning brains and human decency are wearing our masks and lining up for our shots and dreaming of a day when we can just run into the store for a jug of milk, hug our kids and eat at a restaurant again.
Until the next one comes along– and it will. Hopefully when it does we will not have a narcissistic sociopath in charge and won’t play politics while a half-million people die.

I took a few pictures and found myself thinking about making a covid memory box, with some of my masks and my mask bin and my vaccination card, to tell the future that I was a part of this.

Yeah definitely I should hang on to a bunch of those masks…