We must help others recover, too
In the United States, despite worrying upticks in cases in some states, we’re well on the way to vaccinating ourselves out of the catastrophic domestic COVID-19 crisis. To get fully “back to normal,” though, we’re also going to have to — gulp — help vaccinate the rest of the world.
The Biden administration has so turbocharged the process of getting vaccines into arms that, recently, we’ve been administering as many as 3 million shots per day, and sometimes more. Although pockets of recalcitrance remain, demand for the vaccines still far outpaces point-of-delivery supply, and the number of Americans willing to get vaccinated continues to rise. Alleged reluctance among African Americans, for example, appears to be evaporating as access improves. According to President Joe Biden, by the end of May we will have obtained enough vaccine doses “for every adult in America.”
True, we should expect setbacks. It is maddening to see the images of huge spring-break crowds in Miami, jammed together with few participants wearing masks properly. Those young people are only helping the COVID-19 virus survive and potentially to mutate. But they are unlikely to become seriously ill if infected — and if they do take the virus home with them, at least there is a growing chance their parents and grandparents will already be immunized.
I keep thinking, though, about other crowds that were part of the old normal. I think of the masses of foreign tourists who gathered in the summer on the National Mall, waiting their turn to enter the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. I think about the crush of international visitors who used to fill midtown Manhattan at Christmas time, so thick you could barely walk down the sidewalk, laden with shopping bags from Fifth Avenue boutiques and chattering away in every language you’ve ever heard.
One of the languages I used to pick out most frequently in tourist crowds was Portuguese, spoken with various Brazilian accents. Before COVID almost 2 million Brazilians visited the United States each year. But Brazil has seen more deaths from the virus than any other country except the United States; anyone who has been in Brazil over the past 14 days is forbidden to enter the country.
We’ll never really get back to normal as long as international borders are essentially closed. And I don’t see how those borders can fully open until we can be sure that visitors are not bringing with them COVID-19 — perhaps in the form of
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dents and teachers with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. The suspect, who had been expelled from the school, is said to have obtained the weapon despite documented mental health issues. In church, we prayed for the victims. But I didn’t rewrite my sermon.
On Oct. 27, 2018, 11 people were massacred at the Tree of Life Synagogue close to Pittsburgh. I knew the area. My ex-husband had grown up the next town over.
These murders happened the day before Reformation Sunday. We were having choir guests from a local Reform synagogue. And it has long been hushed up that Martin Luther was a raging antisemite.
This time, I rewrote the sermon. Why? Was it because our guests were Jewish? Because half of my friends are Jewish?
Why didn’t I rewrite the sermon when nine people were killed because they were Black? When 17 were killed by a mentally ill but murderous bigot? When 49 people were killed for having the misfortune of being in a gay nightclub the shooter chose? When 13 people, most of them immigrants, were killed in my undergraduate university town by a man who was himself a naturalized citizen?
Did I not rewrite those sermons because I am not an immigrant, because I am not gay, because I am not Black? Did I not rewrite the sermons because I can’t relate to those categories as well as I can to Jewish religion and culture since that’s always been a huge part of my life?
Was it my own complacency, my privilege, my fear of what my congregation might think if I wrote a sermon that some might think was too “political”? Sadly, I can’t say for sure.
So, after the Atlanta shootings, killings that either targeted Asian people because of racism or Asian women because of sexism or because some evangelical 21year-old claimed sex addiction (duh), I vowed I would, henceforth, rewrite my sermon each and every time there was a mass shooting.
In 2019, the metropolitan Denver chain King Soopers requested shoppers leave their firearms at home when buying groceries. It’s awkward to pack heat while picking out chips, six packs or ribeyes.
Just six days after the Atlanta massacre, 10 were shot dead at the King Soopers in Boulder, Colo.
Since I haven’t written it yet, I don’t have to rewrite a sermon. But how can I write anything at all? My pittance of words raised against this utter madness? They are a semiautomatic nothing.
But it’s the nothing we must do — and do and do again. Because if there is any hope that lies anywhere, it’s in our hands and on our lips. It is not — truly and fundamentally — in our culturally fetishized and deadly personal weapons. We actually are more together than alone. But we cannot be that — and still be armed while choosing fresh peas and plums and berries.
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