Upside Down

How inverted the COVID crisis has become.  The elderly and the middle-aged - I'm in the latter category for at least another decade or so - are probably going to survive it because we've been vaccinated but younger people will likely contract it and die because they don't want to get the jab.  Joining them in the vaccine-resistant camp are Republicans of all ages, mostly in the Southeast and the Great Plains. And President Biden keeps imploring them to get vaccinated, and they're like, "Nope! Nope!"

This is what I call "Covidiocy," the idea that a deadly virus can be survived quite easily, with no vaccine, and that all you have to do is wait out the pandemic like it's a tropical storm.  And now the delta corona is circulating all over the country and likely to give more Americans the weaver's answer (as any Family fan knows, that's a reference to death) and possibly create a new variant that no vaccine known to science can stop.  

Listening to people who say you can wait out the pandemic reminds me of that scene in the ocean-liner disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure, one of the few serious disaster movies starring Leslie Nielsen, where the Reverend Frank Scott, played by Gene Hackman, takes stock of the situation after the ship has been capsized by a tsunami on New Year's Eve.  Realizing that the hull is now at the top with the bridge at the bottom, he tells the survivors in the dining room that the only way to save themselves is to make their way down - or rather up - to the hull and try to get attention from a rescue crew, near the propeller shaft.  The only way to do that is to climb a giant Christmas tree to the galley entrance, where a waiter sits injured.  The purser, on the other hand, insists that the passengers stay in the dining room and wait for help.  

Only eight passengers choose to listen to Reverend Scott, and they climb up the tree with him and join the waiter; before the ten of them prepare to make their way to the the hull, Reverend Scott makes one final plea to the remaining passengers.  "If you stay here, you will surely die," he pleads.  No dice.  As he turns to lead his party out, a series of explosions causes the other passengers to climb up the tree at once in a panic, but the tree collapses and they all fall to their deaths.  (Spoiler alert: Of the ten who start out for the hull, only six of them make it out alive.)

Well, vaccine-resistant Americans are like that.  Despite President Biden's - and Anthony Fauci's - insistence that they get vaccinated, they're sticking with their choice not to.  I can guarantee you when the delta corona hits - really hits - these once vaccine-resistant folks will suddenly change their tune and rush to get a shot and save themselves but in the panic - and you can't spell "pandemic" without "panic" - people are going to die . . . people who could have gotten the shot earlier, if they'd only listened.

The difference between The Poseidon Adventure and the pandemic, of course, is that The Poseidon Adventure is only a movie.  This pandemic is real.  And it's going to keep getting more real before it finally ends.  And it won't be a happy ending. You know I was going to say this - there doesn't have to be a morning after, and there is none.