To the editor:

Last week as I sat watching my three young daughters chase fireflies, my college best friend was working an emergency room shift she wasn’t scheduled for. She should have been home with her own daughters two hours prior, but instead she was on an endless hold with any area hospital that would talk to her, trying to find a bed for yet another COVID patient because theirs were all full. She called me in tears later that night because the PTSD she had finally gotten a foothold on since last winter had come screaming back as the Delta variant spread across Minnesota. The only difference between this time and last was that instead of the community bringing lunch, and paper hearts, and celebrating them as heroes, there was deafening silence, even vitriol toward her and her colleagues. I wish I could have hugged her through her panicked sobs. She’s the last person on earth who deserves to carry such a heavy burden.

I fell asleep that night thinking of the stories my neighbor Red told of arriving home from the Vietnam war, expecting the warm welcome his father received and instead being spit on. By no fault of their own, they were blamed for the political angst of a country divided over so many more things than a war. At this point in history, we are divided over even more things than we were then. I just sincerely hope that in our impassioned sharing of opinions on how this time in history will, or “should” be written about, we will take a lesson from that page in history and not cast the good people answering the call to take care of us as the antagonists in our narrative. Likely some of you reading this already find your blood boiling and will let me know in the comments below. To you I say: “Out beyond ideas of ‘wrong doing’ and ‘right doing’ there is a field. I will meet you there.” -Rumi

To all you nursing home, group home, public health, and hospital staff, “thank you” or “we appreciate you” seems trite to even say to you at this point. Maybe it’s more like “respect the hell out of you?” Even the word “respect” falls short.

Probably the most appropriate response would be to simply sit in silence and hold you up to whatever we conceive of God to be with hearts filled with gratitude, eyes brimming with tears, that the people we call neighbors are pretty much the living embodiment of those statued heroes of history we venerate and memorialize today.

Well, for what it’s worth, you’re my heroes.

It’s a weird time, let’s be kind friends,

Lori Mathiowetz

New Ulm