Community Reality

The neighbor is struggling. Needs a ride to the doctor because she cannot drive herself in her present condition. You volunteer when you learn of her need. A neighbor has an electronic subscription to the local paper but she gets a Sunday issue delivered to the building’s door each week anyway. She gives it to another neighbor who she knows is interested in the weekly Sunday edition.

Another person cannot reach the smoke detector or CO detector battery to replace it. The electronic beeping is driving him crazy. A neighbor comes to the rescue with ladder! She climbs stalwartly to the top and extracts the dead battery and inserts a new one. Blessed peace.

In another city block a young single mother cannot find or afford day care for her 3 year old daughter. An elder resident three doors down the street offers to help her so she can find a job. They agree on simple terms and costs that are affordable to the young mother, but also trade help for the elder around the house (reaching those high light bulbs, detector batteries, etc.!). Both households are better off. From cooperation. From mutual respect. From knowing about their own community and its needs.

Switch now, please, to the pandemic. The entire nation has hunkered down to slow the speed of infectious spread. A huge effort went into researching, testing, and manufacturing effective vaccines. Hospital treatments were applied, experimented with, and perfected. Hospital stays from COVID are more successful, yield lower death rates, and shorter stays.

Vaccines have proven effective. The vaccinated mostly remain free of the virus. Those who do get infected suffer less, are rarely hospitalized and recover quickly with few aftereffects. Meanwhile, they are not a threat to the unvaccinated.

Young children still do not have an available vaccine. They are easily infected and spread the virus to others. The kids rarely experience severe symptoms; some do; some die; but the numbers are low. The older people infected by the kids, however, suffer what may.

Those who can be vaccinated should be.

This is the modern day call of community minded citizens. This we must do to protect each other. To lessen the suffering. To lessen the death from a preventable contagion. To lessen the demands on medical personnel and hospitals that are needed for other medical emergencies.

This is also commonsense. We speak of that often in this space. Commonsense, it appears, is not so common! The sense, however, remains true.

Time for all to get with it.

If you truly feel this is not so, then another community responsibility is laid on you: isolate yourself and kids from the rest of the community until solutions are found to help all.

The time to respect you is when you respect others. That is the core value for a community. Without it, it is not a community.

September 29, 2021