Rant #2,628: Which Way Is Up?

“My further thoughts about the coronavirus, now that I have been fully inoculated ...
I just did what I felt was right, even though I do still have some lingering doubts in my head about this entire business.
 
My son and I have been directly impacted by the existence of this thing even though we haven't contracted the disease. He lost his job, I lost my job prior to all of this mess and wasn't able to get another one partly because of what was going on, and our jobs will never return.
 
I was forced to retire, take a remote job that came out of the blue to me, my son sat here for seven months being prepared to think he would be told to come back to work, a call that never came. He has a job now, but he works only a few days each week as opposed to five days a week.
 
And again, neither one of us contracted the disease.
 
I just got the shots literally for myself, and I am comfortable with that decision.
 
I continue to have my doubts about what we have all gone through, even though my extended family has had to deal with this disease personally, one succumbing to it.
 
Is it really another type of flu, or is it Memorex? As I said, I still have my doubts.”
 
A long, long time ago, in what seems a galaxy so far away from today, I was told by a journalism instructor that I had to never, ever use a quote to open a story, but if I had to use a quote, it had better be a darn good one, because it generally is frowned upon to do so.
 
I have stuck with that advice for decades, and in my professional writing, I have started off a story with a quote maybe just once or twice in the many years since I was told this.
 
But today, I am starting off my Rant with a quote, because I happen to think that it is a powerful one.
 
I got the vaccine. I am happy I was vaccinated. But I am still torn by the presence of the coronavirus, and its true impact on our world.
 
I think quite a bit of this has to do with the fact that the coronavirus has been politicized since early on, with our elected legislators using the presence of this scourge as a pawn to do their bidding and push their agendas.
 
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in New York, where the state governor and the mayor of New York City have made this virus into a political football for their own personal gains.
 
And I am still wondering if this is simply another form of the flu, or if this is something brand new, as we have been told for a year now, and we were simply blindsided by it.
 
However, you really have to wonder about this, based on the fact that people who should know about this—or who you would think should know about this—don’t seem to know anything about what they are talking about.
 
Did this come at just the right time, so we could practice a mind and body control experiment on our civilization?
 
Sometimes it seems that way, doesn’t it?
 
We are being told what not and what to do, yet often times the same people giving us our orders skirt the issue themselves … “do what I say, but I will do what I do.”
 
We have struggled to get vaccine appointments, yet others have jumped the line.
 
For every Steve Martin—who sat and called persistently like everyone else even though he is a celebrity—we have people like the late Hank Aaron, Christie Brinkley, Dolly Parton, numerous legislators, sports teams and others who, because of their celebrity status, have gone to the front of the line to insist that if they can get vaccinated, we can too … but not telling us that they didn’t have to go through the horror we did to get those appointments.
 
And then we have the nonsense about communities lacking the resources to get the shots, often neighborhoods of color, but funny, I don’t have a clinic right on my corner either, and the people in these communities can do what I did, get on the computer or the phone and call and click and call and click like I did to get my mother an appointment, so where is the disparity?
 
It is all politics, everything is political, we all know that, and funny, these communities in question, even though we as a society have gone out of our way to bring vaccinations to them, still lag far behind in getting their shots, so this just adds to the nonsense of “disparity.”
 
The only community where the disparity exists is among our elderly, who have been treated like collateral damage since the scourge has come to our shores, first with the nursing home fiasco here in New York and later with the dispersion of vaccines.
 
I mean, who was the genius who thought that making the chase to the vaccine a mostly Internet based relay race, and actually thought that our older citizens of every stripe could play this game?
 
But back to the virus itself … I still don’t know what to make of it, and I don’t think anyone really does.
 
You can have 90 year olds who don’t get it, and you can have 25 year olds who get it and get it bad … and everything in between.
 
My family has been hit with the virus big time. My father in law, in the Veterans Home in Stony Brook, lived through the greater part of the infestation in his quarters, yet right before vaccinations were going to be given out, he succumbed, probably as much to do with neglect as anything else.
 
My sister had it at the peak of the virus in the early days, and she got it really, really bad. She still suffers in the aftermath, still has symptoms every so often, and she also had double pneumonia at the time, yet was never hospitalized. Go figure … .
 
Other extended family members have had it, and are just getting over it as best as they can. One I know of still feels great fatigue from the virus, which he kicked but is still kicking him.
 
Happily, my immediate family hasn’t gotten it, although we have had several scares over the past year where we were checked out and came out OK, a miracle in itself.
 
So in conclusion, I still ask “Which way is up?”
 
I got my vaccination for myself.
 
Maybe I am simply chicken, a coward, just getting it because I felt that I wanted to protect myself.
 
I am not going to tell anyone else to get vaccinated, whether it be friend or family member or foe; that is for them to decided on a personal level.
 
I got mine, you get yours at your own convenience … or at your own peril.
 
I did what I did, and I am happy with what I did, but you have to make your own choices, and since our choices have been taken away from us during the past year, this is one of the few choices we still have left.
 
Do what you feel is right for you … that is my advice, and the only advice I am going to give on this subject.