I read it as a twelve year old and thought it plain stupid. But it did resonate a little anyway because of the lingering horror of memory of kids lining up for polio shots when I was five years old, getting them one after the other (three shots) the nurses working so fast to get through my enormous grammar school that some of the kids bled--but they got right back into line. (I ran away and hid. It took them hours to find me.)

It, as did many others, sufficed to drive that sense of us against them I already had; when I read it later, I had the same reaction I do to similiar stories (like Le Guin's "Those who walk away from Omelas") that I am being manipulated into feeling shock and guilt.