Every year, we have Memorial Day ceremonies and speeches about sacrifices made for democracy to preserve the American way of life. Yes, many folks tune these events out. None are ‘mandatory’ public events. Most have low local participation.
But, at least they happen.
During the early months of Covid-19, we had annual recognition of COVID-19 deaths on local and national news stations. These media memorials have more or less stopped.
We have not found a way to grieve as a nation for this ongoing, rolling disaster.
Instead, as Ed Yong notes in his great Atlantic piece this week, we seem to have wholly tuned out these daily deaths.
He correctly hits on how America’s ideology of individualism has set up the grieving for just more alienation, “If safety is now a matter of personal responsibility, then so is remembrance.”
In a society of ultra-low interpersonal trust, Americans need communal ritual more than ever during these kinds of circumstances.
But, it’s not just our cult of personal responsibility when things get ugly that makes our situation so disgraceful. It’s also our cult of ‘fun and happy-positivity,’ making it impossible to acknowledge ongoing trauma in local communities routinely.
No one wants to attend rituals to mourn the scourge of drug overdoses, homelessness, or COVID-19 mortality, because a) we don’t know how to solve them and b) we don’t trust the government to do anything, so c) it’s better to ignore what we’ve quietly concluded can not change.
With media so fractured, getting 90% of the population’s immediate attention is tough. But we can only get 38million adults, mostly Democrats, to watch the recent State of the Union. That’s a paltry 15% of the adult population.
America needs to be acknowledging and facing our ongoing failures as a society in order to get angry enough to force political solutions. Right now, we are permitting our leaders to avoid the tough topics and dwell on made-up conflicts.