98. Vaccinated

Yes, I received my second Covid shot on Tuesday, and there is some feeling of relief. But there are other strong emotions that kick in with my vaccination victory.

 

Worry—about the two grandsons, 20 and 23, living with me now. They have not been vaccinated, and the 20-year-old had the coronavirus and is still experiencing after-effects. We don’t know when the vaccines will reach them, but he knows that his having had it once offers no sure immunity in the future. 

 

I worry about my granddaughter living in Portland; she’s trying to go to school while working as a flagger. Essential worker, I’d say, as she worked a couple of 90-hour weeks when PGE crashed and was in the turmoil of repairing electric lines. But she has not been vaccinated. 

 

Concern—for the families I know who have been affected directly. For my grandson, and for Representative Pramila Jayapal and her husband, Steve. Steve and Pramila are good friends as well as public servants. Their contact might have been on that awful January 6 when Pramila huddled with other elected Representatives and staffers in a Capitol basement where some deniers refused to wear masks. Maddening.

 

Outrage—Yesterday I could not contain myself with a good friend, a woman who is a strong liberal—and a strong anti-vaxxer. I have other friends who remain vaccine skeptics, and when I’ve asked for evidence of the deaths and diseases caused by the vaccines, I get silence. Or notions that evidence is suppressed in this country. Yesterday, almost yelling at my friend, I said that thousands of people are still dying each day; if the vaccines were killing people on anywhere near that scale, who could suppress that news and how would they do it? I brought up polio and George Washington inoculating his troops at Valley Forge with live smallpox virus; I said that if a few people did die, it might make life safer for the living. I vented.

 

Hope—I’m hopeful with the new administration and with Biden’s Pandemic Relief Bill. Vaccination rates are rising and new cases and deaths are falling. This bill—with all of its liberal flowers not directly related to Covid, is revolutionary, because it targets the lower 85 percent of Americans. It might lead to the biggest expansion of the middle class in America since the post-WW-2 G.I. Bill. Only this time African Americans and American Indians and Asians and Latinos will not be omitted by fancy rhetoric and official indifference. Hope.

 

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23. Covid-BLM lens on Women

Some men friends will object, but this Covid-BLM lens has, for me, shown brightly on the way we—White men—have kept women down, at least in the life of this Republic. We haven’t lynched them or kept them as slaves, and the beatings and rapes we’ve inflicted are seen as aberrations, punishable under the law if properly reported and subjected to judicial scrutiny.

We have not cracked their heads open with police batons as we did John Lewis’s. Bull Conner didn’t turn dogs loose on them because they were women. Our police have not used chokeholds or kneeled on a woman’s neck in front of Apple phone cams.

But unarmed Breonna Taylor was shot at least eight times by police in her Louisville apartment, and a Black woman died in a Texas jail, arrested for failing to use her turn signal! There’s a Black #SayHerName movement—quieter than BLM, but growing, which was started by three Black women.

And reports are that Covid-19 has all women doing more of the housework and home schooling, and giving up or reducing their online hours more than their male partners. It should not surprise.

From the beginning, our forbearers were making a country for the convenience of, and to be ruled by White—Anglo White—men. The Declaration declared that “all men are created equal,” and it meant men. It actually meant White men who owned property. White did not include Italians, Slavs, and the Irish, because they were not part of the founding cabal.

The founders sliced and diced the numbers of Black slaves who could be counted for purposes of establishing Congressional numbers while not allowing them the vote—women too were counted but couldn’t vote.

When women got college educations, they got jobs as “fact checkers,” rarely as writers. Women did write the programs that fed the computer that made the atom bomb. Women who served in WW II were labeled civilian employees and denied the GI Bill. Rosie the Riveter went home, the boys went to college and took up programming (women were not good at math).

This week, “mothers formed a wall” against Federal agents in Portland.

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