Every year, my favorite outing with my husband is going to the polls to vote.

Maybe that shows we don’t get out much, immersed as each of us is in our work.

But it always feels special — almost sacred. It feels more like a grand privilege than a duty.

The idea that we live in a nation where we, the people, get to choose our leaders often sends shivers down my spine as we pull into our local firehouse to cast our votes.

This year, that was especially true as it felt like democracy may hang in the balance.

In July, we were moved by the words John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman, had written to be read after his death: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”

In the end, there was, after all, a peaceful transition of power.

The system held: The courts up to the United States Supreme Court dismissed or found untrue false claims of a stolen election. The rioters at our nation’s capitol, trying to stop the count of electoral votes, failed in their mission. 

But that transition of power, following the will of the people, is something I will never again take for granted.

The presidential inauguration was, for me, riveting in a way it had never been before.

I have in front of me the words my sister, Heather, printed from the poem, “The Hill We Climb,” which Amanda Gorman recited that day — her yellow coat shining like the sun, her hair piled high like a crown.

My sister calls her the Walt Whitman of our era:

We will not march back to what was

But move to what shall be

A country that is bruised but whole,

Benevolent but bold,

Fierce and free ….

I had the same shivers running down my spine on Wednesday as my husband and I pulled into the massive tent complex on the University at Albany campus to get vaccinated against the coronavirus disease. 

Again, it felt more like a privilege than a duty. The time of coronavirus has been difficult across our country and around our world.

I have not suffered the way many have. When I write obituaries for people who have died of COVID-19, I can hear the pain in the voices of the people who loved them and lost them, and I feel inadequate merely recording their words.

But here is the way out — getting vaccinated. Certainly, it will change my own life. I will be able to write stories again by seeing people face to face rather than through a computer screen.

If enough of us do it, it will change all of our lives, reopening our economy, restoring lost jobs, putting food back on kitchen tables, mending broken hearts and broken communities.

On Wednesday, I stood in grateful awe of the scientists who had developed a vaccine in record time, and  of the government that was dispensing it for free.

I smiled at the National Guard soldiers in camo fatigues who directed us in the parking lot.

I felt encompassed in a world of good will. People like ourselves, waiting for a shot, stood respectfully in line — masked and socially distant: a man walked haltingly with a cane, an elderly woman leaned on the arm of a younger woman.

Inside the soaring white tent, flags hung overhead and lines of booths were defined by drapes of purple and gold, the school’s colors.

Workers wore bright lime-green vests, each with a plastic see-through pocket, where their role could be displayed — from runner to medic.

When my turn came to register at the long table, I was greeted by a soft-spoken Black man with a gold ring in his right ear. He gently rifled through papers until he found my name.

He held up a plastic-coated list for me to indicate if I’d experienced any of the symptoms listed. I had not.

I progressed to the side of a white woman with a blonde ponytail who asked me to wait until I was waved into one of the booths. In less than a minute, my turn came.

I sat across the table from an Asian woman with beautifully manicured iridescent pink fingernails who pointed to my name and medical history on a computer screen. She gave me an eight-page fact sheet from Pfizer that explained much about the vaccine I was about to get.

A nurse was summoned who went over what would happen if I went into anaphylactic shock as I had once before after a bee sting. I rolled up my sleeve and the shot was administered with calm efficiency.

I was given a vaccination record card with the date of my return appointment — exactly three weeks for my second shot of vaccine.

“That’s your ticket back to society,” said my husband.

My husband and I then walked to an area where folding chairs were spaced six feet apart for people to wait.

As I looked around me, I was overcome with gratitude. Everywhere, I saw people helping people — a National Guardsmen pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair, a nurse kneeling down to talk to a seated woman at eye level, erasing the worried look from her face.

I was also struck not just with the kindness of Americans but with our diversity. Here, under this tent, were people of all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities.

“We’re in this together” is a phrase that has frequently been used during this pandemic. And the only way out is to work together. In the same way we must still wear masks and stay apart in order to protect each other, we each must get vaccinated for the common good.

Focusing on the things that are the same in each of us because we are human beings is better than focusing on the differences that set us apart. That is the way our nations will move forward.

We admire the initiative here in Albany County to reach traditionally underserved populations — with a pop-up site in the rural Hilltowns last week and community vaccination clinics in Black and brown neighborhoods.

We’re pleased, as we wrote last week, that national data shows the rates of infection and of deaths declining steeply at nursing homes since workers and residents there were vaccinated first. That was as it should be since they have been most vulnerable, accounting for a third of the nation’s deaths.

It makes sense, too, to have people with comorbidities — like the elderly, highly vulnerable — and essential workers vaccinated so they can carry the rest of us through. But each of us, when our turn comes, must get vaccinated.

That is the only way that all of us will move forward — together.

As the poet said, we must move to what shall be: A country that is bruised yet whole,/ Benevolent but bold/ Fierce and free.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer, editor