Recently, I had a conversation with someone I care for dearly. The pleasantries led to a few “remember that time” chuckles, which led to memory lane walks, which led to a sort of state of affairs quid pro quo type of comment moment. I don’t know when we crossed that line, but we did. Suddenly, that unspoken fine line of speaking about Covid without speaking about Covid was traversed. We picked it up and used it like a jump rope, we representations of each side – the vaccinated and the non. Like 2 people who’ve been waiting for a final shoe to drop for over a year, we sensed the tension, our collective brain wheels turning. Words needed to be chosen with care. Nuances must be ignored. Emotional consideration should be taken. The thing is, could we do this? Right or wrong, the media has separated us into two distinct camps. Daily we are barraged with information that supports “us” and denounces “them.” If two opposing ideologies cannot both be correct, then wherein lies the truth? Cautiously, I ventured out onto the ledge, asking my comrade what cemented the desire against the vaccine. They responded, “Because this is America. I am not opposed to the vaccine. I just don’t want it, especially this mRNA thing. No one knows what it will do in the future. But, in this country, we aren’t forced to take a vaccine we don’t want. That’s not my country. America doesn’t do things like this.” Oh, mi amor, how I wish that were so. I am a proud American, daughter of a WWII veteran, sister of two amazing Vietnam Veterans, mother of a Navy veteran. In my brief one year pageant career of the early 80s, my talent was a dramatic performance of an original piece I wrote on patriotism viewed through the eyes of my grandparents. It garnered me 10th place, despite the fact that I had trouble making eye contact with the audience. Introverts unite. I love this country. I love those who champion and those who protect. What I love most, however, is that we still have so much room for improvement. We can still do so much better. But, our chain cannot be strengthened unless we can see the weakest of our links.
It is our human nature to gloss over our mistakes. I’m supposed to be learning to groom my standard poodles. If you could see Finn’s ears today, you’d laugh. I am choosing to think of them as starter ear dreads. See? That’s a nice gloss over. But, as a country, we wield the gloss like a municipality mosquito spray night during a West Nile outbreak. We do it up big. In the course of time, we’ve only recently stopped the policies that allowed forced sterilization for anyone who fell into the categories of overly lustful, poverty stricken, or possessing feeble mindedness. But, that’s recent. Let’s dive deeper. There’s the Virginia Act of 1662. The powers that be in Jamestown did not like the men treating the children birthed to them by their female slaves as free people. They hated seeing these children free to walk through town or worship in the community church. So, they made a law that says paternal standing did not matter. If your mother is a slave, so are you. America did that. There was the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. Volunteer cavalrymen slaughtered 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho tribe members, mostly women and children. When one of the captains testified this truth to Congress, he was mysteriously murdered. There are too many other indigenous people massacre incidents to discuss. We eradicated an entire culture. America did that. In the Wilmington Coup of 1898, a group of white supremacists overthrew a legitimate US government using both weapons and careful plotting with the release of false reports of black violence and black crimes in one of the only large middle class African American cities. Thousands of black residents were driven out of Wilmington. Many died in the uprisings that followed. America did that. During WWII, 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, many of them 2nd generation Japanese Americans, were taken from their homes and “relocated” into internment camps and housed in barracks made from tar paper with no plumbing. Their children were often sent into orphanages within these exclusion zones. Two-thirds of these individuals were already citizens of the US. America did that. Then, there was the 30s era “New Deal” and its exclusion of farmworkers from any of the financial support given to farms. There was the Black Wall Street Massacre in Tulsa. In the 30s, we repatriated over 350,000 people of Mexican heritage back to Mexico, including a strategic and often violent “volunteer” program designed to drive Hispanic US citizens back to their country of origin, only to foster a new campaign to bring them all back 10 years later when workers were sorely needed due to WWII drafts. America did that. We did that. I did that. I am an American.
I finished my conversation with my beloved on very pleasant terms. We were both proud of our ability to debate civilly and still remain enamored of each other. Go us. We both ended with a very serious but jovially spoken barb. They hoped I didn’t suffer endlessly for the rest of my days with mystery ailments granted to me by a dangerous vaccine administered by a government heck bent on power over people. I hoped they never needed lifesaving immunotherapy for cancer, since that is where the mRNA technology was developed over a decade ago. In my usual introvert fashion, I sat and mulled over my words for hours, fashioning all the thing I wish I’d said into abstract mental art. I suppose this is just another side of our American quilt: the really good, the really bad, the really ugly, and the extraordinarily beautiful. God bless us, everyone.
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