Yellow Light

 Hours and days seem to be rushing by in new and mysterious ways. After a year of sitting around waiting for something inevitable, it seems to have arrived. I received my second shot for my vaccination against COVID-19 last week. This occurred in a jumble of other moments that included the limited opening of the county in which I live, hastening the return of students to the inside of schools. My wife and I went out and sat in a restaurant for lunch. Disneyland announced plans to reopen their gates, and not just as a vaccination site. 

After a year of feeling as if I were walking through pudding, life began to pick up. Movie theaters in my area will soon be allowing a limited number of patrons come and sit and stare at their screens. Will we all be able to drop our remotes and pry ourselves off the couch to out to see the newest releases when they seem to be dropped into our living rooms? Will students take us up on the dare to come back to the classroom, or will parents wait until everyone has had a shot, and not just those clever enough to get a teaching credential? 

There are still a ton of questions, but direct confrontation and stable messaging of a new administration that seems intent on putting needles into as many arms as they can makes a huge difference. At the beginning of March, testing increased and new cases went down. This is in stark contrast with the insistence of the previous regime that if you tested more you would find more cases. One hundred days of masks and vaccinations seem to be doing the trick. Is it possible that the garbled messages coming out of the White House a year ago might eventually have produced this same result? Possible, but not very likely. 

Not likely at all. 

Still, there are those who want to continue to argue and discuss. Senator Rand Paul wanted to debate Dr. Fauci about the need to continue wearing a mask after recovering from the virus or being vaccinated against it. "You're telling everybody to wear a mask, whether they've had an infection or a vaccine," Paul said to Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "If people that have had the vaccine or have had the infection. If we're not spreading the infection, isn't it just theater?" The senator from Kentucky was not referencing movie theaters here. He was intimating that the government's response is overkill. It should be noted here that the senator is also a doctor. Of ophthalmology. Not infectious diseases. 

So here we are, on the one hand racing forward. On the other, we are standing still. My mind has landed on an image of a flashing yellow light at an intersection. Sure, it's not red, but it definitely isn't green either. What do we do? Slow down, and proceed with caution. I'll be wearing my mask even though I've got two shots of good news in my arm. 

To be safe. Not sorry.