The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I love this pandemic vaccine roulette, a small window into how the world works when it’s confronted with a crisis that for us old codgers is life and death. A week ago I gave up trying to navigate the distribution rumors of a clinic up the road offering inoculations or the senior center crowd sourcing its limited supply and just decided to get my name on a list of potential survivors and see if new doses would arrive at some uncertain future date. Sure, I was bothered that my neighbors and friends found where to get theirs already while I was completely shut out … and okay, I was even pissed they didn’t bother calling to offer me their inside info, maybe figure if I delayed and died they’d have a less crowded neighborhood. Or maybe, more likely, they got theirs, screw the rest. It’s a dog eat dog world out there in Virustown.

But lately I’m reading about hospitals in the area, once they got their hands on the vaccines, called up their VIP donors, in some cases those who gave more than 10 grand to the hospital foundations, and offered them first dibs on the life-saving shots. Welcome to America, I guess, in case we underlings needed a clearer view from the back of the bus folks would be happy to throw us under if it meant they got into the lifeboats of the Titanic. Pardon my mixed metaphors, but hellfire, it just appears a bit callous for our health care providers to skip the folks who are fighting in the front lines of this pandemic to reward their rich benefactors.

Okay, I know this is how it works. The rich get richer and the rest of us get crappy health care. Move along everybody, nothing to see here. You had your chance to get rich and what did you do with it? Accept your poverty and shut up, peon! The wealthy are always first in line, you know that, and if you didn’t, you been living on the South End a little too long. If nothing else, this vaccine rollout should give you a chance to see how democracy works. If you thought it worked for you, I got some nettle land to sell you. If you aren’t on a ventilator by then….

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