Today my wife and I got the first covid-19 vaccination. I was willing to wait for awhile because my wife and I have been isolating so completely that I feel pretty safe. However, she was anxious to start the process so we can once again see our children and grandchildren, and there is no point in one of us doing so and not the other.

It was an amazingly simple process once we actually decided to do it. The county announced openings for people over 65 years old, which describes both of us. My wife went on line to the announced website and signed us up about ten days ago. The directions for getting there left a little to the imagination. They provided a time and a street address – but the street address didn’t show up on any maps or our GPS thing because it turns out it was just a parking lot, not an actual “place.” I figured that the street address must be enough to find signs directing us to the location. No such luck, there were no signs. However, once we got close enough we could see tents in a parking lot with lines of cars. Obviously that was it, but it took a couple of fairly long loops around long blocks to finally get to the entrance going in a direction that we could actually enter from. It turned out to be the parking lot of the local minor league baseball team – that information would have been a handy hint about where we were going. A non-existent street address wasn’t very informative, especially since we didn’t have any clue about whether it was a drive up affair, or an indoors event like that had been doing at the local basketball arena.

Once we managed to stop going down dead-end roads and found the correct one-way entrance it went amazingly smooth. There were traffic directors everywhere – seemingly dozens of them. We went through something like eight check points making sure we had a “ticket” appointment, had our paperwork filled out properly, asked about allergies, scanning our paperwork, etc, etc. Everyone was very pleasant, there were absolutely no waiting in line, and then we were through – sitting in a parking space while we waited for 15 minutes to go by so we could be on our way. The entire thing took perhaps thirty minutes total, but most of that time was spent being occupied with driving a hundred feet or so, being interviewed yet again, and moving on – we were distracted enough that the time wasn’t even noticeable. We even got a reservation for the next shot in three weeks.

I sure hope these vaccines work as advertised, and that new variants don’t show up that start it all up again. It is really too bad that people have been unable to control themselves enough to stomp it out at the very beginning. All of those who refused to take the simple precautions are directly responsible for most of the 450,000 deaths in America, soon to be over 500,000. In my mind, they are all guilty of the widespread impacts of the virus in America – pure and simple. They are aware that they are engaging in “super spreader” events, with the explicit intention of spreading the virus. If that wasn’t going on we could have been past this whole thing sometime in April 2020 and we all knew it (including the anti-maskers). We had the resources and knowledge necessary to stop the pandemic in our country – just like it was in those countries that actually followed the simple recommendations for six weeks and avoided the deaths, illnesses and huge financial impacts of being “free” to be stubborn.

However, we are still being stubborn as a nation, so we will drag out the costs and the deaths for another few months. It is so comforting to me to know that we are “free” to infect our family and neighbors, and to destroy the livelihood and savings of local businesses and friends. Freedom from being held responsible for the consequences of stupidity seems to be part of the American value system. We didn’t need any vaccines, and the deaths and illnesses weren’t foreordained – we just needed to have a sliver of caring for each other and as Trump said, “poof, as if magic it would have been gone,” but action was necessary to make that “magic” happen. Hopefully enough “anti-science” folks are willing to be vaccinated to get us beyond this whole event. I don’t have much confidence that they will do so and their behavior will drag this whole mess out for months more – but perhaps the vaccines will work and my wife, my family and my friends won’t die excruciating deaths. I understand that death is just around the corner for us, but I would rather not hurry it up so a bunch of stubborn people can proclaim their “freedom” to take “their” chances (along with those of mine and my loved ones). Perhaps we are turning a corner back to “normal” sometime this year.