We’re turning a corner. The cultural and policy implications are paramount. Will government officials force people to get vaccinated, or, at least, make participation in modern life impossible without it? Will the social nagging and shaming kick up a notch? I think “yes” to both questions.

In a larger sense, if vaccines are available to anyone who wants one and you have yours, why do you care if someone else doesn’t? We used to be OK with letting people accept their own risks. Are we now shifting to a culture where personal risk is centrally managed by our government?

Many U.S. states and cities have a growing surplus of Covid-19 vaccines, a sign that in some places demand is slowing before a large percentage of the population has been inoculated, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News.

The data indicate as many as one in three doses are unused in some states. Appointments for shots often go untaken, with few people signing up.

 

[…]

 

Federal officials are in the early stages of rethinking distribution. Vaccines have so far been doled out based on population.

 

“We’re going to go through stages, as we vaccinate higher and higher portions of populations, where it will make sense for us to continue to watch where vaccines are needed, how vaccines are distributed, the best way to reach more people,” Andy Slavitt, senior adviser for the White House’s Covid Response team, said at the end of March.

Here’s a neat poem by diplomat and Milwaukean George F. Kennan called “Three Score and Ten”:

When the step becomes slow, and the wit becomes slower,
And memory fails, and the hearing declines;
When skies become clouded, and clouds become lower,
And you find yourself talking poetical lines;

 

When the path that you tread becomes steeper and darker;
And the question seems no longer whether, but when –
Then, my friend, you should look for the biblical marker,
The sign by the road that reads: Three Score and Ten;

 

At this point you’ll observe, if you care to look closely,
You’re no longer alone on the highway of life;
For there trudges behind you, and glowers morosely,
A bearded old man with a curious knife;

 

At first you defy this absurd apparition
(For it’s old Father Time, with his glass and his scythe);
You swear you were never in better condition –
The body more jaunty, the spirit more blythe;

 

And you laugh in his face, and you tell the old joker;
“You must be mistaken; I’m feeling just fine,”
But the wretched old scarecrow just picks up his poker
And gives you a jab and says: “Get back in line”;

 

So you swallow your pride, and you march with your brothers;
You do all the things you’re instructed to do;
But you’re sure this compulsion, just right for the others,
Could not have been really intended for you;

 

And you turn to the thought of your erstwhile successes –
How brilliant, how charming, how worthy of fame;
‘Til a small voice protests and the conscience confesses
What an ass you once were and how empty the claim;

 

Then the ghosts of the past find you out in your sadness,
And gather about, and point fingers of shame –
The ghosts of stupidities spawned by your madness –
The ghosts of injustices done in your name;

 

And you grieve with remorse for the sins you’ve committed:
The fingers that roamed and the tongue that betrayed;
But you grieve even more for the ones you omitted:
The nectar untasted, the record unplayed.

 

But the cut most unkind, and the cruelest teacher,
Is the feeling you have when, as sometimes occurs,
The wandering eye of some heavenly creature
Encounters your own, and your own catches hers;

 

And you conjure up dreams too delightful to mention,
And you primp and you pose, ’til it’s suddenly seen
That the actual object of all her attention –
This burning, voluptuous female attention –
Is a fellow behind you who’s all of nineteen.

 

So you swallow your pride, and you scurry for cover
In the solaces characteristic of age:
You tell the same anecdotes over and over,
Forget the same names, and reread the same page;

 

And at length you concede, though with dim satisfaction,
That it’s not on yourself that your peace now depends –
That for this you must look to a different reaction:
To the weary indulgence of children and friends.

 

Yet, if given the chance to retread, as you’ve known it,
The ladder of life – to begin at the spot
Where the story picked up, and before you had blown it
Would you take it, dear friends?
I suspect you would not;

 

So let us take heart; we are none of us friendless;
And fill up your glasses, and raise them again
To the chance that an interval, seemingly endless,

Will ensure
Before you
Become Three Score and Ten

Follow the link and read this whole thing.

This has been the deliberate shattering, in the name of virus control, of what was left of our common life.

 

Between individual experiences and those on the bigger scale of national or international politics lies most of human society: clubs, church groups, voluntary associations, the whole organic life of communities great and small. All of this relies on peer- to-peer social connection – and it was all abruptly halted by lockdown.

 

[…]

 

It’s just difficult to see, because everything now, from our media to Government lockdown policy, seems geared toward ‘just me’ or ‘everything’ – but nothing in between.

 

Who cares about local life, now our public conversation happens online, at colossal scale, in terms set by Chinese companies and Silicon Valley social justice evangelists and massaged by algorithms?

 

The answer has to be: us. We care. Even as it’s grown harder to see our life in common, we need it more than ever. The alternative future is an unjust, atomised, deeply inhuman place.

What a legacy she left to generations of kids.

Cleary died on Thursday at her home in Carmel, California, publisher HarperCollins said in a statement.