Good Morning. Awakening to a typical New England blanket of snow.


At the height of the storm yesterday, of course trolleys don't operate. Most of the attractions were closed in town anyway. It did taper off quickly; I was out and about by 10am. I managed to strap my snowshoes on after lunch and climb nearby Prospect Hill, the highest point in this city.

Today though, I'm headed down to camp. We're once again taking some halting steps towards our springtime adult training, Covid be damned! This is Boston though, most of the staff is vaccinated, and we'll all be masked up while we're in our conference room most of the day.

Look, I'm no freakin' Covid Denier. Some of my scouting friends are dead from this, and I had at least one driver in 2020 that got it in the first wave. But I am starting to think that I'm "over" it. It comes down to this - we had our chance, and maybe with the right guy in charge we might have been able to make a credible effort to stop the spread.

We did not.

The United States today is the world leader, but not in a good way. According to one online source, we have 59.4 million cases recorded here since the start of the pandemic. The next closest country is India, with 35.4 million. Consider though, that the population of India is 1.38 billion - three times larger than us.

My thought now, for at least the last six months...If you don't want to get vaccinated, then fine. That's your own business. But don't come crying to me for help when you get sick. And I mean ALL of that - hospitals are in crisis mode, but haven't really acted like it. When there is a mass casualty event, there's something called "triage". It's something I learned back when I was an EMT.

In a nutshell, I arrive at an accident scene. There's two patients; one has a severed limb and is bleeding out. The other is unconscious with head trauma. I'm a solo rescuer - who do I save? Make the wrong choice, and they both die. Choose correctly, and maybe I can save one. Hospitals aren't doing that right now - everybody gets care. Covid patients should be receiving palliative care at this point; they are the ones that are going to die. In turn, critical care beds and ER bays will remain open enough to handle more complex issues and maybe save those people, instead of turning them away to die because the beds are full of unvaccinated plague rats.

But that's just me.

In any case - I'm off to camp. We were initially going to have this class in the spring of 2020. (HA!) Like everything else, it was postponed, cancelled, re-scheduled, and delayed TWO full calendar years by now. The staff are some of my dearest Scouting friends; some folks I haven't seen in those two years - I'm rather looking forward to today.

But that covidian specter looms over us once again. We are defiantly persevering, until we are told we cannot. Who knows what the rest of the winter will bring?