*This was my writing piece I wrote for my club in August. I am proud of what I wrote and it took courage for me to read it, knowing I am a conservative minded woman in a group of liberal minded women. My country is a changin' and I wrote this with concern in my heart.
Disclaimer: It is 3am on Tuesday, Aug. 10. I am up in the middle of the night writing this because the idea came to me, it was keeping me up and it’s something I am most disturbed about these days. In writing this I certainly hope I do not offend anyone. Much of what I write will be based on my personal experiences and observations. After I finished writing this and was able to self reflect I believe a major take away from it is that I understand and appreciate both sides. It’s fair to say I fall somewhere right in the middle. That being said I’d like to start with a few facts about myself:
#1 - I am vaccinated and so is my husband. I got vaccinated because my mother is classified as one of the most vulnerable. My husband got vaccinated because he is in the public everyday for his job. My children who are 19 and 15 have chosen not to get the vaccine at this time and I respect their decisions. I would say it is about 50/50 for my friends who are vaccinated. 50% are and 50% aren’t.
#2 - I believe Covid is real. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am well aware it is a deadly disease to the most vulnerable. Even people who have recovered got very sick and it remains unknown what the long term effects will be on their health.
Alan Jackson wrote a song entitled, “Where were you when the world stopped turning?” The song was about September 11, 2001. The day America came under attack by terrorists. Most people know exactly where they were when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. The same question could be asked about March 2020, specifically March 13, 2020. That was the day schools shut down and lock-down orders were implemented. Americans were asked to stay home for two weeks to flatten the curve in order to not overwhelm the hospitals. Fast forward to the current day, eighteen months later. What was supposed to be 10 days turned into three months of being locked down in Illinois. In my opinion things have gone from bad to worse. Usually I have a positive outlook on most everything but recently I expressed my pessimism with my friend, Sarah. I shared with her that I feared the life we knew in America may have ended on March 12, 2020. She disagreed with me and pointed out that pandemics last on average three years and life as we know it will come back. I’m glad there are Sarah’s in the world and I’m blessed to call her my friend. It seems to me that America has been in a rebirth before the pandemic but March 13, 2020 really set things into motion. A month ago I traveled to Hawaii. There were many hoops that my vaccinated self had to jump through, not to mention the additional hoops my unvaccinated boys had to jump through but we were after all going to paradise so I jumped through the hoops, knowing that once my family arrived the hoop jumping would all be worth it. I understood that when we got off the plane we’d have to go through a line and show our QR codes issued to us by the state of Hawaii. I was dreading the process, thinking TSA might herd us mainlanders like cattle but to my surprise the process went well. Sure it felt a little like Nazi Germany, standing in line and showing our special codes in order to be accepted and then ushered in but I can appreciate that Hawaii draws in tons of tourists from around the world. My biggest irritation came when we checked into our resort. The resort clerk indicated we’d have to show our QR codes again to prove the airport granted us passage into the big island. I smiled at this worker who was only doing her job but I asked her, “How do you think we got here? There’s only one way to get into the big island and we sure didn’t swim.” To me that wasn’t following the science. Just last week NYC advised that unvaccinated people can no longer go out to eat, go to a gym or attend concerts. Restrictions throughout the country loosened in the late spring of 2021 and employers started to talk about what a return to work would look like. A major employer in central Illinois brought some of their employees back to work but unvaccinated people were kept separate from vaccinated folks. Granted this has changed some since the Delta Variant has wreaked havoc. I can appreciate the liability employers face and making those decisions are way above my pay grade but the human side of me struggles with it. An unvaccinated friend of mine who returned to work compared the isolation at work to wearing a big scarlet letter. And whatever happened to HIPAA, the privacy act? I handle workers compensation claims and the only thing I can inquire about is a workers’ work status. Asking about their overall health status is unheard and down right unethical in my line of work. A woman I know who has attended the same church for upteen million years and has been an active member of her church choir was recently told she could no longer sing on Sunday mornings unless she was vaccinated. I think that was when I took a step back and asked myself what in the world is going on? The Covid 19 vaccine is not FDA approved. The death rates are down especially when you look at January 2021 compared to August. Never in America’s history have we locked down the healthy. Perhaps part of my frustration is in the mixed messages we as a country have received. First we were told masks were not necessary. Then we were told masks were vital to stop the spread. Then we were told two masks worked better than one. After we were vaccinated we continued to wear the masks due to again mixed messaging that yes we could still spread the virus to finally hearing that No, we couldn’t. Currently we’re being told that vaccinated Americans should wear masks in high risk areas but then Delta arrived. On July 29, 2021 Newsweek reported that according to the CDC the Delta variant is equally contagious amongst vaccinated and unvaccinated and they can spread it equally. It reported the CDC acknowledged they were wrong but said people still needed the vaccine to lessen the symptoms. It is becoming increasingly difficult to decipher facts from fiction.
Will vaccinated and unvaccinated people soon be walking around with big UV (unvaccinated) and V (vaccinated) letters tattooed on their body or stamped on their clothing indicating their vaccination status? All rational thoughts tell us absolutely not, those are what the vaccine passports are for, right? When our media publicly declares that life for unvaccinated people needs to become very difficult I shudder. I truly do see both sides of this. A good friend of mine is a nurse at one of our local ER’s. She is seeing an uptick in Covid positive hospitalizations and most of them are unvaccinated. All of these factors weigh heavily on my heart and I wonder what is to come for America. Is there a rebirth happening? What does that even look like and at what cost? Only time will tell. Perhaps I’m overthinking things. If I ask myself what really bothers me the most it comes down to the ones I care deeply about; my children and some of my dearest friends who are very intelligent individuals I might add have made the choice not to get vaccinated. Personal health choices have always been championed in America but it feels almost as if a darkness has spread throughout the country and pitted us against each other. I’m reminded of a verse from Mark (Mark 3:24) “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.” .
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