I have a friend from my Peace Corps days in the 1960s named Francis Koster, and we’ve retained a friendship from those days. He now lives in North Carolina after a career in pediatric health care administration.

He has two websites about his work — one is “Pollution Detectives” that deals with finding pollution health threats to children like lead in school drinking-fountain water, and the other is “America’s Optimistic Futurist.”

This column is one of his writings in the latter and is used with his permission. It deals with a situation where he lives that is very like our own here in Eastern Oregon.

Sometimes I will be in some large gathering of thousands of people, and the speaker will ask all veterans to rise and be recognized for their patriotic service. And then they say, “Let’s applaud our Patriots.” The audience always applauds. When I stand, people will come up later and say, “I appreciate your service.”

Since our nation’s founding 245 years ago, 646,500 members of our military have died defending America. It sounds terrible, but so does the fact that over the past one year 667,000 Americans have died from COVID. The disease has killed one in 500 Americans — more than all those who died defending American independence over 245 years — including both sides of the Civil War.

When I enlisted in the Army upon graduation from high school in 1960, all young men were required to register for the draft or be prosecuted and fined of up to $250,000 and/or jail time of up to five years.

The law creating the draft was passed because Congress felt that in times of war the needs of the nation were more important than the desires of individual citizens. You did what you were told, including leave home for an unknown amount of time to fight, get shot at, and maybe die to protect your fellow Americans. If you did not register for the draft, your family was ashamed and you were punished.

I am confused. We are at war with COVID, but people calling themselves “Patriots” will not wear masks or get vaccinated. Back in the day, they would be called “cowards” or “draft dodgers” and they would flee to Canada. Rowan County, North Carolina, where I live, has 122,000 residents over 12 who are eligible for COVID-19 vaccination. As of Sept. 15, just over half who should have stepped up to be vaccinated did so. Of Rowan County’s total population, 24,000 have caught COVID, 364 have died and about 8,400 survivors will have expensive health care problems for life.

The virus has evolved into the more contagious and deadly delta form. Our hospitals are drowning in sick people. Nationally, over the past four months, 98% of those infected and hospitalized had not been vaccinated. Those people that did not get vaccinated have incurred medical bills averaging around $25,000 and in most cases will need to have those bills paid for by the government, raising taxes for the rest of us. Yea “Patriots.”

I am a former pediatric health care administrator. I have seen parents cry after they held their child’s hand for the last time. You do not forget things like that — it bruises your soul.

As folks with strong opinions about “freedom” debate how to get kids back to school with no masks, during the first week in September almost a quarter of a million kids got infected with COVID-19 — just about one-third of all newly reported cases.

Is your definition of “Patriot” someone who sacrifices to protect others, or does it mean “you can’t tell me what to do?”

Are we now a country where practicing selfishness that harms other people has become something we ask people to rise and be applauded for?

Where has our sense of community responsibility gone? And, can it be recovered?