Petition For A Ticker-Tape Parade To Honor Essential Workers

Will Rogers was once asked why he was not a war hero, in a time when many Americans were. His answer, just slightly elaborated on, went something like this: We can't all be war heroes. I mean, someone has to be left to handle the long and arduous job of sitting on the curb and applauding when they go by. For those of us who were not heroes during the Pandemic, that remains our job.

I recently spoke with a friend, let's call her Ann-Marie, who served as a nursing administrator throughout the Pandemic at a major suburban medical facility. Her job, day in and day out, from which she never wavered, was to staff the facility with nurses willing to handle Covid-19 patients. It was not an easy job. Needless to say, some nurses and other ICU staffers resigned. At one point she was in competition with a New York City facility that was offering tens of thousands of dollars per month for nurses. At another point she was asked to staff a sports facility to do vaccinations. In return, the nurses would get early vaccinations. A handful of the nurses showed up, took the early vaccinations, and never came back. But that was all the easy part. The hard part came on the days when she was called to the Covid-19 wards to share the final moments of a patient who was dying without the accompaniment of any family members. Those were the hard days.

A hundred years ago, during the Battle of Verdun in World War I, one of the longest, bloodiest and most ferocious battles of the War, each day the allied troops in their tunnels shared with each other in hushed tones this simple thought: Today: on ne passe pas" (French for, "they shall not pass").
So too, each day during the Pandemic, the essential workers and first responders who came together in hospitals across America brought with them only that same noble thought: as to this patient: "on ne passe pas."

Mostly, they succeeded.

We can at least do our job and applaud when they go by.