Readers of a certain vintage may recall a paranoid dream I referenced last year from “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” the 1968 comedy album by Firesign Theater. As an imagined plague sweeps an imagined city, a cab radio plays:
… in a massive traffic tie-up as the death rate continues to soar. And now let’s go to the river’s edge and Charles B. Smith.
Ed, it’s an amazing scene here. Like lemmings, the crowds are waiting on the shore, torches blazing, as the long line of shrouded funeral rafts drift lazily into view, great black candles flickering at helm and stern. The excitement is contagious … and so are the Black Cross volunteers as they pass from family to family, pausing now and again to touch a child’s head. I wish I could … but I can’t. So long, Ed.
Leonard Pitts bids so long to Black Cross workers, the anti-vax contingent working in hospitals and public service jobs:
No telling how many of you there actually are, but lately, you’re all over the news. Just last week, a nearly-30-year veteran of the San Jose Police Department surrendered his badge rather than comply with the city’s requirement that all employees be inoculated against COVID-19. He joins an Army lieutenant colonel, some airline employees, a Major League Baseball executive, the choral director of the San Francisco Symphony, workers at the tax collector’s office in Orange County, Florida, and, incredibly, dozens of healthcare professionals.
Well, on behalf of the rest of us, the ones who miss concerts, restaurants and other people’s faces, the ones who are sick and tired of living in pandemic times, here’s a word of response to you quitters: Goodbye.
And here’s two more: Good riddance.
Pitts speaks for many of us exhausted by how the pandemic has constricted our lives for over 18 months now. Even nursing home residents not killed by Covid are seeing their physical and mental health decline from the isolation of being restricted to their rooms, activities curtailed, and from not sharing meals with friends or family visitors. (I’ve seen this firsthand.)
Pitts continues:
We’ve been down this road before. Whenever faced with some mandate imposed in the interest of the common good, some of us act like they just woke up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. “There’s no freedom no more,” whined one man in video that recently aired on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah.” The clip was from the 1980s, and the guy had just gotten a ticket for not wearing his seatbelt.
It’s an unfortunately common refrain. Can’t smoke in a movie theater? Can’t crank your music to headache decibels at 2 in the morning? Can’t post the Ten Commandments in a courtroom? “There’s no freedom no more.” Some of you seem to think freedom means no one can be compelled to do, or refrain from doing, anything. But that’s not freedom, it’s anarchy.
When it’s black-clad punks breaking store windows, Trumpists decry that anarchy. When asked to support their communities in eliminating the virus they once claimed did not exist, that kind of anarchy they approve.
Angry, are you? You’ve made the rest of us angry at you.
The difference is, your anger is dumb, and ours is not. Yours is about being coerced to do something you don’t want to do. Like that’s new. Like you’re not already required to get vaccinated to start school or travel to other countries. For that matter, you’re also required to mow your lawn, cover your hindparts and, yes, wear a seatbelt. So you’re mad at government and your job for doing what they’ve always done.
But the rest of us, we’re mad at you. Because this thing could have been over by now, and you’re the reason it isn’t.
That’s why we were glad President Biden stopped asking nicely, started requiring vaccinations everywhere he had power to do so. We were also glad when employers followed suit. And if that’s a problem for you, then, yes, goodbye, sayonara, auf wiedersehen, adios and adieu. We’ll miss you, to be sure. But you’re asking us to choose between your petulance and our lives.
Petulance is for losers. There is plenty of vaccine, but we’re fresh out of sympathy. So are a growing number of hospital systems:
Novant Health, a massive hospital system in North Carolina that has made the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for its employees, suspended 375 employees across 15 hospitals and 800 clinics last week for not complying with the mandate. But over a five-day period, 200 employees agreed to get the vaccine, Megan Rivers, the hospital’s director of media & influencer relations, said in a tweet. More than 99% of the hospital system’s 35,000 employees are vaccinated, Rivers said.
The remaining 175 who were suspended last week have been fired, according to CBS affiliate WWAY.
Novant Health’s terminated join over 150 at Houston Methodist and another 150 at ChristianaCare in Delaware who lost thjeir jobs for refusing employee vaccine mandates. “Simply put, it is essential to ensure the safety of our patients, team members and communities,” Novant said in a statement.
Novant Health has urged the community to get vaccinated. It joined other health systems in the Charlotte area in releasing data this month showing how more than 90 percent of their covid-19 patients had not been vaccinated. David Priest, Novant Health’s chief safety, quality and epidemiology officer, acknowledged to WGHP that the recent wave of covid patients had overwhelmed the hospital system.
“They’re tired. I’m tired. We’re all tired,” he said.
The rest of us? We’re tired and pissed.