The end of the beginning

One year ago, this newspaper postulated that America was at war. The virus we faced could prove as virulent a foe as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, our editors believed; foreseeing that the U.S. death toll could rise above the 405,399 casualties of that cataclysmic conflict.

We weren’t wrong. From his breast pocket, President Biden retrieved his daily schedule last Thursday night, and read to the American people the latest COVID-19 death toll of 527,726 printed upon it. His subsequent consecration of our national grieving of at that moment may enter the grim historical pantheon of speeches equivalent to FDR’s “Day which will live in Infamy” address to Congress after Pearl Harbor or George W. Bush’s 9/14 pledge from the rubble of the World Trade Center, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people – and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

Never has The Louisiana Weekly prayed that one of our predictions would prove more incorrect, nor regret more deeply a year later when we were proven right. God help us. God help us, if we are not smart enough to help ourselves.

For, to quote another great war leader, Winston Churchill, “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Put simply, we may be exhausted. Everyone may be seeking normalcy, but the war has not ended yet. We likely face months of mask wearing and social distancing until our population ubiquitously receives the vaccine. The president has called for open availability by May 1, 2021 – at all ages – across the entire country. The campaign commences to convince all to schedule a vaccination.

Now we shall find where human reticence lives. Many will deny this gift, suspicious of the implications; suspicious of the compulsion. Americans, in general, hate being told what to do, and African Americans, in particular, hold an understandable historical reticence to obeying a mandated command.

This is not slavery, though. The shot represents freedom: the freedom to assemble; the freedom to speak in the open air; the freedom to associate with our loved ones; and the freedom to follow the consciousnesses of our characters wherever they may lead.

The vaccine frees us. The willingness to wear a mask for another few months, and to resist the urge to engage in huge street parties for another few weeks, stands as a small price to pay to release us from quarantine. Two shots – and a quarter year of continued vigilance – allows us to undertake all that we wish in the coming decades.

Failure to take basic precautions also reminds us that World War II did not prove our deadliest conflict. For that one must look to the American Civil War’s 655,000 casualties. God help us if our laziness to endure a few simple safeguards sees this nation’s death toll supersede even that number.

This article originally published in the March 15, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.