Remember this child in the face of horror
So I was reading Twitter today and ran across a posting by a clergy person who is a hospital chaplain. In this particular posting, they wrote about how watching un-vaccinated people die of Covid remains a significant, and terrible, part of their professional lives, even though the worst of the pandemic seems to be passing.
The particular person that the chaplain wrote about on this day was a young father, an antivaxxer, whom the medical staff compassionately kept on a ventilator (even though he was actually gone) long enough for his seven-year-old child to read him a bedtime story “so Daddy won’t be frightened in the dark.”
Then, of course, out came the tube, and the darkness descended.
And of course that man didn’t have to die. Thousands upon thousands of Americans didn’t have to die. Thousands more will do so in future, and they don’t have to either. But they did and they will…because they listened to Fox News, and Alex Jones, and Donald Trump, and many in the GOP, and so many others who told them that the disease wasn’t real, or wasn’t serious, and that doctors were fools or monsters, and the vaccine was poison, and masks were useless.
We are now at the point, of course, where we have to start asking a simple question. To wit, those people…those denialists…aren’t they guilty of murder?
I would say they most certainly are.
I can only hope that somehow, someday, justice will come their way.
And the child who read to his or her dying father will gain some kind of redress…
And peace.
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Until next time…
Onward and upward.
~mjt
Copyright©2022 Michael Jay Tucker