I want this pandemic to end. With approaching 700,000 US dead, lives are ripped apart, I lose sleep fretting. Angry folks lash out. I don’t blame them.
I was raised in a Christian community. My family on one side is Dutch Reformed Calvinist. On the other, German Lutheran. They argued, although, as I see them now, they agreed on much more than they disagreed. Me, I’m a perennial student. I’ve read tons of theology and history from and about past centuries.
All this study has given me a desire to treat my neighbors as I want them to treat me. I could’ve learned that from a ham-handed educational film on the Golden Rule that the teachers exhibited every year or so to stuffy darkened rooms of whispering and restless grade-schoolers at North Bellingham Elementary School. I would’ve saved myself years of time and trouble if I’d paid attention.
I’ve read enough Covid-19 research literature to see that the doctors and scientists are still struggling to learn to mitigate or end the pandemic. The best recommendations today may change tomorrow.
I’m not a scientist or a physician. There’s nothing I can do in that line. If I had my life to live over, I might become an epidemiologist or a biochemist. But I’m seventy-two years old. Fat chance of change now.
I’m one person without expertise or power. I cannot change the course of the disease or the economy.
All medicines have risks, but the risk of vaccination today is tiny compared it to the pain and chaos around me. I’m brave enough for that.
Masking is ugly and uncomfortable, but it slowed the 1918 flu pandemic and has slowed Covid-19 in places where it is practiced.
It all boils down to how I want to treat others and others to treat me. I want everyone to do what they can to end the pandemic. Will a jab in my the arm and mask end the pandemic? Of course not. But the jab and mask are the two things I can do.
That’s why I’m vaccinated and wear a mask.