It’s been over a year and a half since life in these United States has felt “normal”. More than 700,000 Americans have died of complications related to Covid-19 since the pandemic began.Yet last weekend, life felt normal again. Finally.
Fall has always been my favorite time of year. Football, post-season baseball, and local arts & crafts festivals are in full swing in Autumn. Last weekend, enjoying all of those activities felt perfectly normal again.
The weekend began with the Southern Boone Eagles football team defeating School of the Osage on SoBoCo’s Senior Nightbefore an enthusiastic crowd of spectators. The next day, Ol’ Mizzou resumed its 110-year Homecoming tradition after a mostly virtual celebration last year. The city of Columbia hosted the parade and football game which both attracted huge crowds of revelers. My wife and I enjoyed tailgating in the parking lot outside of Memorial Stadium and cheering the Tigers on to victory on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon. After a year of no tailgating allowed, it felt great—and perfectly normal—to visit and laugh with old friends again.
On Sunday, we rounded up the whole family and headed to Hartsburg for the famous Pumpkin Festival which was cancelled last year due to the pandemic. The corn fields and the streets of the tiny town were as packed as ever with locals and visitors excited to attend the beloved festival once again. While there, my family drank our fill of homemade root beer, ate funnel cakes and turkey legs, and saw lots of familiar, smiling faces. I was greeted with bone-crushing hugs and energetic waves by a few of my former students, which was, of course, the highlight of my day.
When I wasn’t outside enjoying the gloriously warm fall weather, I was tucked cozily into my favorite recliner while watching the Major League Baseball playoffs, a couple of college football upsets, and the Chiefs playing on Sunday Night Football. Every venue had one thing in common: tens of thousands of fans packed into the stands, overjoyed at the opportunity to enjoy life as if a deadly pandemic wasn’t still raging throughout the world.
Yes, life felt normal again last weekend. It felt good to participate in all of the things we used to enjoy before the world as we knew it shut down last year. But is life really returning to normal, or was last weekend just an illusion?
New cases of Covid have been trending downward over the last few weeks, but does that mean the end of the pandemic is near? With school districts including Southern Boone, Jefferson City, and Columbia either ending mask requirements or considering ending them, will Covid cases in schools start trending upward again soon? Will kids who are infected at school then bring the virus home to their family members? Time will tell.
In the meantime, everyone who is eligible to receive a vaccination should do so in order to protect those who cannot be vaccinated due to their age or pre-existing health conditions. The vaccines have proven to be overwhelmingly safe. Yes, there have been a few documented cases of bad reactions to Covid vaccines, as is the case with all vaccines. Yet billions of people around the world have received their jabs without any serious reactions. I don’t personally know anyone who has had a reaction to a Covid vaccine that merited a hospital visit, but I do know people who have been very sick and/or hospitalized (and some who have died) who were unvaccinated. Statistics show that over 95% of people being placed on ventilators and/or dying of Covid were NOT vaccinated.
If we want to end this pandemic so that life can truly return to normal, then we need to stop listening to anti-vax conspiracy theorists and lunatics who think that only Satanists wear masks. When people say, “Do your own research,” and their idea of doing research is reading outlandish, unsubstantiated claims made by a blogger, we have to use some common sense and defer to doctors and actual medical researchers.
Those health professionals are not part of a sinister plot to strip us of our rights. If you have made it to this point in your life without contracting polio, smallpox, mumps, measles, rubella, tuberculosis, or typhoid fever, then you have—until this point in your life—trusted your health to the doctors and medical research community responsible for vaccines. And I’d wager that you don’t know the ingredients in those vaccines any more than you know what’s in the Covid shot.
Get your shots, wear your mask in crowded places and indoors, wash your hands. Those are very simple things to do. I have done all three, and I do not feel like my rights have been infringed upon whatsoever. I do not feel oppressed. I have not felt the sting of tyranny. I am free, I am vaccinated, I am healthy, and I am alive.
I thoroughly enjoyed everything about last weekend, and I hope that we can continue to have many more weekends just as enjoyable as time goes on. If we want to get back to normal once and for all, it will take a commitment from all of us to be decent human beings and do our part to end this pandemic.
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