Seeking COVID vaccine: Letters to the editor, March 14, 2021

Wants equitable COVID approach

A local news channel said food and agribusiness sectors can get the COVID-19 vaccine. So I went on the MyTurn website to find out exactly what is the definition of “food sector.”

This is copied directly from the website: “Workers supporting restaurant carry-out and quick serve food operations, including food preparation, carry-out and delivery food employees.”

So I read this as the local pizza delivery guy who is 20 years old and is in perfect health can get vaccinated before a person with an autoimmune disease like multiple sclerosis? Or myself, who is not the picture of health and 63 years old? Why is someone’s pizza or hamburger more important than my life? Because if I get COVID-19, I will die.

I have been doing everything that the CDC says and been at home since last March, only going out to the grocery or to help care for my 87-year-old mother. Why must I continue to be trapped in my home so that someone else can go out to eat, or get take out food deliveries? I just don’t understand how that is equitable.

She won’t show indifference again

Joyce Reed, in a Feb. 26 letter, quoted from a letter of mine, indicating, to her, that I “hated” since I said cruelty to one group of persons was equal to cruelty to another. Yes, I do hate “cruelty.”

The opposite of both love and hate is: indifference. Most could not believe it remotely possible that a failed businessman, mired in bankruptcies, paying off indecent-behavior lawsuits, filthy-mouthed, ignorant of history, geography, could be a serious candidate for the U.S. presidency. We were very “indifferent” and thus the 2016 election outcome. I’m sorry, but that situation was precisely where Germany was in the early 1930s, when no thinking person could dream that a psychotic like Hitler could actually be elected to power. It’s been said to death, “that good men do nothing.”

There are things that cannot be compromised. “A little bit cruel,” “one murder better than serial murders,” “insurrectionists only killed five, not 3,000” ( WTC bombings).

But yes, it is the same, and I at least had delusional indifference to the early behavior of those mobsters. Loud warnings of genuine hatred for that kind of behavior ahead of time might have prevented it — quiet indifference doesn’t work.

Ms. Heng is swimming against tide

Elizabeth Heng, the latest candidate to throw her hat into the Republican Senate seat challenging U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California, has a long row to hoe.

A child of immigrant parents from Cambodia, she states, the large population of Southeast Asians identity politics will serve her well. She believes her parents’ experiences in Cambodia’s Communist regime, clearly, puts her in a position to represent Republican conservative positions well. Albeit, the right- wing, anti-Newsom playbook probably will not be kosher in California politics. The popularity of the Biden COVID legislation, recently passed, will throw a wrench into the Newsom recall efforts she has attached herself to.

Ms. Heng is typically the new genre of Trumpers already in Congress hitching their wagon to a disaffected base riding the skirts of disinformation and demagogic venting that surrounds itself with cryers, especially business people unwilling to follow State COVID protocol while receiving fFederal assistance, to wit, Mr. Pismo’s.

The bad news for Ms. Heng is, the Dems have the numbers. And for Californians, the strategy is, there is no strategy. What Dems must do is not lose the 2020 big mo that gleaned a Congress. Get the vote out, don’t sit on laurels. Erase the midterm mentality of staying home.

This story was originally published March 14, 2021 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Seeking COVID vaccine: Letters to the editor, March 14, 2021."