130. Service

“Surgeries to remove brain tumors have been postponed. Patients are backed up in the emergency room. Nurses are working brutal shifts. But at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., the calls keep coming: Can Idaho send another patient across the border?” (NYT 9/14) There are 29 patients from sparsely vaccinated Idaho (40%) in Sacred Heart rooms (Washington is at 61%). 

Idaho Governor Brad Little, meanwhile, is contemplating his next moves against federal vaccination mandates. He’s not alone; California police—or at least big globs of them—are suing over mandates, some in Los Angeles “alleging that the department has created a ‘hostile work environment’ for the unvaccinated and that the mandate violates employees’ privacy and civil rights.” (The Guardian 9/14)

I wonder if any of these people tuned in CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night. The entire program was devoted to 9/11 and the New York firemen who fought to save people in the towers. They saved thousands, and over 300 from the NYFD lost their lives in the battle. More impressively, over 60 current firemen and women in the department are sons and daughters of those who died.

One dramatic portrayal—and I am sorry I do not remember the name—is of a leading officer who cleared a path for hundreds in the South Tower and made it out himself before it collapsed, and ran right into the North Tower to help extricate more before it too collapsed. Surviving firemen agreed that he knew he was going to his own death.

The examples are extreme, but the idea that someone who enters into public service as a police officer or a governor would fight against personal vaccination on the basis of “privacy and civil rights” is absurd. 

All of us, I believe, owe to our friends, family members, and neighbors. And although we cannot all become biblical good Samaritans, we generally do not consciously endanger the health and well-being of the stranger along the road. But those who choose public service as a career, whether it be as a medical, police, or fire worker or a governor, are, I believe, obligated to put the health and safety of their constituents at least at the level of their own health and safety. 

The selfishness of the time is astounding. And if this ego-centrism cannot be broken by common sense, let the screams of the dying unvaccinated wake the resisters. 

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