Take me to tomorrow
Preparing to turn the page on the calendar, or swipe the calendar on my smartphone, I’m really ready to toss all of the COVID stuff in the dumpster. Two years of this stuff is gracious plenty and I for one am yearning for life to return to normal.
That begs the question, do I refer to the new normal, or the old normal.
I’m hoping for the old normal. The new normal, I’m afraid, includes booster shots for this danged thing every eight months or so in order to be able to do anything that has to do with the old normal.
I refer specifically to the ability to travel, relatively unfettered, wherever I want to go on this planet.
I’d really like to travel with my friends David and Joe Thornton to Israel some time in 2022.
Israel, for reasons which I think are obvious, has never really been high on my list of places to see. As I have matured and been able to visit places like that other Rome, I have become all the more interested in visiting places with religious historical significance.
I’d like to visit Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, Masada, the Sea of Galilee and so many others.
I’d like to take an Eastern Mediterranean cruise that visits Patmos and Ephesus.
Joel and David have been over there a couple of times and assure me that it is a safe trip. The folks who don’t get along with each other over in that little neck of the world understand that tourist dollars are just as important to both groups.
As I have written previously, cruising is my vacation of choice. You pack and unpack once and let the ships take you from one place to the next.
I suspect that the owners of those cruise lines, whether it is Carnival, Royal Caribbean or whoever, are going to require that travelers be able to show proof of vaccination against this COVID thing for the foreseeable future.
For those of you who may have never had the opportunity to cruise, you need to understand that there is so much common space, so many handrails for folks to use — whether it’s up and down the halls to the staterooms or up and down stairways from the casino to the chapel (there’s more travel between those two locations than you might realize) — and the dining rooms and shopping venues where a small city of people come into contact with each other every day.
Long before COVID I remember the ship’s staff, usually extraordinarily thin little girls, with the jars of hand sanitizer saying “Washy-washy” every time you passed by.
In addition to the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean, you know I have a longing to return to Alaska and I’d really like to do some of those Scandinavian cruises up the coast of Norway or around Iceland. Or perhaps a Transatlantic that goes from Oslo to Iceland and Greenland before winding up at a port on the Canadian Maritimes.
You get the picture. When other people want to go to Jamaica, Aruba or the Dominican Republic for the warm weather and beaches, I’d prefer to go to one of the northern climates. I want to see polar bears. I want to see reindeer, moose, maybe a walrus or a narwhal.
The key to going anywhere in the world in the future is the ability to get beyond this COVID thing.
Governments are going to be highly reactive to every new variant of COVID that comes along. Why reactive? Because people are not being pro-active in getting vaccinated.
I know, it’s your body, it’s your decision as to whether or not you get the vaccine. I get it. Thanks to modern-day research and development the vaccine was developed so quickly and I get it that some folks are hesitant to take a shot until every potential ramification is known.
Call me naïve (and many of you will), but I have every confidence in the brain trust at the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the vaccines would not have been approved for use if they had not been as thoroughly vetted as possible.
At this point, I have very little hope that it’s just going to fade into the sunset. Unlike the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago, population has mushroomed to almost unimaginable levels and our ability to transport ourselves, and our bacteria, germs and viruses around the globe within a matter of a few hours has complicated the situation.
No one has ever confused me for a doctor, specifically, never a virologist. I won’t pretend to be an expert, and only reasonably well-versed on COVID. What I do believe is that this thing has hastened death for better than 800,000 Americans. Yes, you can argue that a whole lot of people who have died suffered from other underlying life-threatening conditions, but I am confident that if there was no COVID, a whole lot of those people would still be around for their families at this holiday season.
Doug Walker is the former associate editor at the Rome News-Tribune and now works as a public information officer at the City of Rome.