Well, I have. Or at least I’m contributing. I got my first COVID-19 vaccination this week. I’m aware that not everyone can say this but for me the operation was smooth, the injection painless, and the side-effects non-existent. That actually seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Of the thirty or so people I know personally who have received at least one shot, three had a sore arm for a day and one of those sore arms was accompanied by a night of chills and fever. I’ve heard a higher percentage of these same people complain louder about the morning after effects of encounters with spicy foods or adult beverages.

I have seen some warnings about posting images of this card to social media. I’m sure they are well-intentioned and the warning is, in general, a reasonable one. However, it appears to me that the only personal information on the card is my name and birthdate, and those have been circulating on the World Wide Web for years. Even so, I don’t want to be totally irresponsible and completely ignore the warning so, inspired by Captain Yossarian’s censoring methods, I’ve blacked out the vowels and odd digits.

As you can see, this isn’t the first time I’ve willingly become part of the herd in an effort to avoid a devastating disease. The phrase “social distancing” had not yet been coined in the 1950s but, even without a catchy name, parents really worked hard at keeping their kids away from strangers during the frequent polio outbreaks. I suppose there were exceptions, but it seemed to me that pretty much everyone was ecstatic when vaccines became available, and there is no question that everyone was happy when those outbreaks stopped happening every year or so. It’s certainly unfortunate that not everyone sees the COVID-19 vaccines, or even the disease itself, in the same light that polio and associated vaccines were seen in the last century, but I have hope that we will all at least be happy when the outbreaks stop.

UPDATE 6-Mar-2021:

I got my second Moderna COVID vaccine injection yesterday. The operation was smooth, and the injection itself painless, but things got mildly unpleasant later. I don’t recall ever having any sort of reaction to a vaccination until last year. I received the first of two Shingrix (for shingles) shots in January and decided to get the second one at the proper time in March even though COVID had just hit. Getting that second shot was one of the very few times I was inside a pharmacy during the last year. I had a reaction to that shot that was unnervingly like COVID symptoms. For almost two days I had chills, a fever, a mild headache, and just generally felt like crap.

The cause of the COVID reaction was explained to me as follows and I imagine pretty
much the same thing applies to Shringrix.

Although none of the COVID vaccines being used contains any actual virus, either living or dead, they apparently resemble it quite a bit. Once injected, the first dose of vaccine runs around building defenses. When the second dose comes along, it’s pretty easy to mistake it for an attacking enemy. After all, the lighting isn’t very good in there. The two doses may do battle with each other until all the identities are worked out.

I got my shot a few minutes past 11:00 AM. When I went to bed around 10:00 PM, I noticed that my arm was sore where I got the injection. That in itself was kind of unusual. At almost precisely twelve hours after the shot I was hit with chills and aching joints. That lasted for an hour which I got through by piling on an extra blanket and putting my body in self-cuddling mode. The aching joints continue today along with a slightly elevated temperature (98.8 vs my normal 96.6). There have even been a few flashes of hot and cold but nothing like that first hour. I’m treating it with Girl Scout cookies.

As election day 2020 neared, I found myself thinking about a blog post made in response to the election of four years earlier. Revisiting that post, Fear Is Very Scary, seemed a rather natural thing to do, but the form of any revisit wasn’t obvious at all. In fact, I quickly decided that there wasn’t much value in even thinking about it until the results of the election were known. In 2016, I was traveling on election day, and the post I’m talking about was made a month later when I was back home and my thoughts had settled a bit. I was home for the most recent election, but hit the road the very next day. A month later, I was again back home, but this time my thoughts were not yet very settled. More importantly, neither was the election itself.

ADDENDUM 10-Jun-2025: This post was originally published with a photo of Andy Kim cleaning up debris from the January 6 assault on the Capitol. It has been taken down to comply with its copyright. The story it linked to is here

Some contended that the election remained unsettled even as major milestones were passed. All the vote counts — and several recounts — were completed and by December 9 all fifty states certified their totals. On December 14, members of the Electoral College met in every state and made their votes official. Either of these events should have settled things and allowed me to pick an angle to approach that four-year-old post. Neither did.

The last official milestone on the way to inauguration day was the counting of Electoral College votes by a joint meeting of the Senate and House of Representatives on January 6. It was obvious that this would not be the smooth and boring formality that it typically is, but I was confident that it would put to rest any real hopes of overturning the election, and, with that in mind, started to give some thought to how to reflect on the post from 2016 a few days ahead of the meeting. I decided against copying and updating the post. Instead, I would simply link to the post and comment on it. That 2016 post identified a number of occasions in my life that had been scary; Things like the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s assassination. I ended the main part of the post with “I’ve seen the world survive some pretty deep piles of doo doo in the past. Today’s doo doo is different and may even be deeper in spots but history suggests that there’s a pretty good chance that the world will survive it too.”

I figured that the new post could point out that, yes, there had been some scares during the previous four years, but we had survived them, and none were in the same class as those listed in the 2016 post. Then January 6 actually arrived. Violent insurrectionists actually breached the Capitol and forced the lawmakers to evacuate. Many questions remain, and numerous investigations are ongoing, but among the few certainties is the fact that five people died. It is a pile of doo doo — some of it literal — that is clearly as big and as scary as any of those I listed in 2016. The mob was eventually removed and the counting completed, but even then, more than half of the Republican Representatives and eight Republican Senators claimed to believe that the election was not settled. Instead of being able to express relief that the fears prompting that December 2016 post had not been entirely justified, this post must acknowledge a situation every bit as scary as the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Many arrests have been made and more are certain to follow. President Trump has been impeached and charged with “incitement of insurrection”. He will be tried by the Senate even though he is no longer in office. Conviction could prevent him from ever running for office again. A mix of rumors and credible threats of violence aimed at the inauguration of  President Biden prompted numerous closures and an unprecedented number of security forces in the nation’s capital for the event, which went off without a hitch.

There are still plenty of things to worry about. Things like climate change, systemic racism, domestic terrorism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the economic problems the pandemic has caused. Domestic terrorism includes that January 6th assault, and there is still good reason to fear there might be more like it. We are hardly free of fear, but the USA has managed yet another peaceful transfer of power, and most people I know are both relieved and hopeful.

I don’t really know how to wrap up this post, so I’m going to sort of copy from 2016. I tacked a song link onto the Fear Is Very Scary post. The song, Fear Is Never Boring, had nothing to do with the content of the post, but I’d borrowed from its title. It was performed by a band, The Raisins, whose members, while no longer together, have all been — and continue to be — very active and important in Cincinnati’s music scene. As 2020 wound down, the guy who wrote Fear Is Never Boring released an album with an opening song that became a favorite of mine the instant I heard it. When I saw the official video a short time later, it too became a favorite and made me love the song even more. It’s tempting to think of it being written specifically for today, but its roots go back to 2009. It is not inherently political at all, but it is inherently hopeful and buoyant. Give it a look and a listen. You’ll feel better. I promise. Turn This Ship Around