Keepin' the COVID Alive

Way back in 1980, the Beach Boys enjoyed one of the last hits of their estimable career, Keepin' the Summer Alive. It espoused all the things they were famous for and was a pleasant bit of radio fodder.

Forty-years and change later, it is ironic this sunny, harmless tune could serve as the anti-vaxxer's death-wish anthem, albeit slightly re-titled. Let's call it Keepin' the COVID Alive.

Without employing words like mental illness or stupidity, it is tough to figure these folks out.

I was hugely relieved when the worst of the pandemic lifted. The virus was ugly, a monster without a face. Excepting the knots of rural Republicans treating it like a fetus, we'd have eliminated it by now.

What I found most disturbing was that in the middle of our political and societal rancor, we mostly ignored the medical miracle that happened underneath our noses. That three—three—vaccines were developed to combat the novelcorona virus.

I mean, who wanted to croak before watching Republicans destroy the democracy that has been the envy of people the world over? (I'm over the moon that Republicans are finally showing themselves as amoral, power-mad sub-humans as I've always suspected they were.)

Transparency, right?

But if you're like me, you're suffering post-COVID political fatigue. And having to watch the legions of the orange-haired continue to dispute not only the results of last year's election but the existence of a pandemic (perpetuated by the very citizens complaining loudest about newly instituted mask mandates) is pretty close to insufferable.

In demonstrating their imagined sense of impermeability, the largely-Republican core of anti-vaxxers has unwittingly sustained and enabled the very thing they say doesn't exist. And when it's not making them sick, it's killing them.

Do I dare refer to this as culling the herd?

I certainly detest twentieth-century Republican's notions of governance, but do I fervently and truly hate them? Do I wish they'd all succumb to the Delta variant and be gone? Probably not.

I mean, my father was a Republican (admittedly of a strain light-years removed from the current iteration) and a sibling is as well. And ironically, I get along with that sibling better than those who declare as Democrats.

Go figure.

And after viewing the documentary Seattle Is Dying, I have as many reservations about unrestrained liberalism as I do about unrestrained conservatism.

Before we're forced further into another round of COVID restrictions which no one—liberal or conservative—wants, can't we come to see this as a health issue and not a political one?

And when our scientists create vaccines and test them and introduce them to a population starving for them, can we at least seize the opportunity to keep ourselves alive today and fight to enact our extreme agendas tomorrow?

To the folk in conservative bastions like Missouri and Alabama wearing their vaccine hesitancy like an Olympic medal, rest assured it is a short-lived thing. When you're suffering the long hauler ravages of COVID, it'll feel like a permanent hangover.

And in the worst-case scenario, how're you going to vote Republican from the grave?

Have you really, really thought this through, people?