February, 2022
Washington — Knowing I am a veteran, occasionally people say to me "thank you for your service." My reaction is always a mixture, in roughly equal parts, of acknowledgement and temptation to reply, "You don't know the half of it."
My service is what a citizen can be called upon to do for his country. It involved putting aside some of my rights and beliefs for a cause my country was trying to achieve. It involved putting myself repeatedly into danger in a combat zone, on a sea-tossed powder keg of a ship, one of several named after active volcanoes for their tendency to blow up.
These days, the people who should be thanked for their service are hospital workers, for the deadly dangers they encounter treating Covid patients. We can all do our part to help them by making small sacrifices — vaccinations, masks, distancing — to beat back the disease and keep it from mutating into endless variants. I view such sacrifices in the same sense as my naval service: a citizen's obligation when called upon. And in a doubtless better cause.
That's not how a sizable number of my fellow citizens see it, however, asserting that it is somehow more honorable to place ill-defined individuals' rights over individuals' responsibilities, even if it endangers hospital workers and many others. The assertion of these rights, whatever they are imagined to be (it's often hard to tell on what they are based), is being manifest in ways that are endangering our health care systems and even the cohesiveness of our country itself.
So when anyone thanks me for my service, I hope that they are giving of themselves in the service of fighting the pandemic, in the here and now. If so, I'll thank them back for it, many times over. They may be saving my life and the lives of my loved ones, not to mention protecting our whole society.
