I had to pass up free tickets to a show I would like to have seen just last weekend. The venue required a vax card and masks. So I had to pass.
So I guess I'll be the lone dissenter here, and I hope that doesn't come with condemnation. I am un-vaccinated and will remain so until the medical field at large figures out how the ham-sandwich this virus works. I do believe they will, in time, but right now it is changing faster than they can adjust to the mutations. I understand the need to do something, and do it fast because so many were sick. I am the last person who needs to be told. My parents had it severely. Hell, I had it. Most of the people I work with did too, and we were expected to be at work if the Black Plague was going around. Just buried one of my friends ashes. Guess what - he was vaxxed. It found a way in and shut down his kidneys. In two weeks he was gone.
Another of my very close friends had her daughter vaxxed just so she could go back to school. She's had severe abdominal bleeding and can't keep food down. Now a formerly healthy, athletic 20-year girl has lost 37 pounds since July. Her aunt and mother-in-law were both sickened by the same vaccine, one badly enough to be hospitalized and cautioned against the follow-up dose. Annecdotal? Maybe. But I know these people. Nobody wants to talk about it because it is seen as anti-vaccine speech. She just about lost three family members to pressure for this stuff, one of them her oldest child.
So no, I won't be lining up to get a shot that maybe doesn't even work anymore. I don't have that much to live for, or to lose. Like I said, I had the original virus last year, I am not that worried about getting one of new strains running around. There's absolutely no medical evidence that says I'd be any worse off than last time, and there's a lot of question about how much natural immunity plays into how susceptible I really am. I'm not against getting vaccinated, and when they get it right, I'm there. You can test me to hell and gone meantime. I'd be willin' to slip a $20 for a positive test for the two weeks off. For the record, the Girl in the Pink Floppy Hat is positively furious with me over this decision. She's double-vaxxed, and saran-wrapped, and still scared to death. It's not the biggest fight we've ever had, but it's a close second. There are times when it's good to have about a 3500 mile head start on her.
Seriously, worst of all, in the beginning of this pandemic, I hoped if nothing else we'd learn some lessons... how to take care of each other, how to survive on less, how to produce things again, that somehow we'd put aside differences and try to get along. "We're all in this together" was the buzz phrase. No we ain't. We haven't learned a damn thing. We still don't make anything here, so when the shelves go empty, people go indiscriminately crazy and hoard. We can't even agree on how to get out of a crisis. We're blaming each other for it now. I'm just an observer, not a participant. I have no idea who I caught the virus from, and I don't care. I don't know who I caught the last cold I had from either. It doesn't matter. I don't remember ever sharing a joint at a concert, but now probably ain't the best time. I just... I won't add to the paranoia. I treat people the same way I always have. I think everybody has to deal with this in their own way. They have to find what their own comfort zone is and stay in it. If it isn't time for you to go back to a public place with a crowd, then yeah, don't do that. If you're someone like me who would just as soon not be surrounded by people who are freaked out by you not masked up and carrying a vax card, then stay away from those situations. I don't want anyone else to feel awkward around me, and the same thing, likewise. It's a strange time, but I have acclimated to it.
I'm not going to let it change me. I'm not going to be frightened, propagandized, or shamed into defeat. I don't think you can stop a virus from acting like a virus by making people stop acting like people. I'm going to take care of the people close to me, and keep doing what I'm supposed to. Eventually the really smart people will figure out how to kill this thing, and we can get back to concerts without all the etc.
