Perspective: Almost 90,000 dead and no hint of national mourning. Are these deaths not 'ours'?
in New York, a sort of potter’s field where it has long been considered a dishonor for a soldier to lie. It is a fate the national cemetery system was designed to avoid.
In fact, there is a conspicuous absence of any collective mourning at all. The reason is as simple as it is terrible: We share no understanding of these staggering losses asAmericans have a common set of expectations and rituals for responding to national losses, whether they’re from war, terrorism, school shootings, natural disasters or assassinations. We lower flags to half-staff. We hold candlelight vigils.
The pandemic dead have received almost none of this, and the omission is significant — even if the dying is still just beginning. Shared grief brings people together like little else. In the absence of the common bonds of kinship, place, language, faith or heritage, national identity is forged in ritual and the sense of shared experience among strangers, the vast majority of whom will never know one another. It is made of feeling and remembering together.
One of the best examples of this “levelled pause” came in a headline in Le Monde on Sept. 12, 2001: “Nous sommes tous Américains” — “We are all Americans.” Just thinking about it brings a lump to the throat. It is as perfect as it is devastating, not least because we know what comes after. We know the coalitions, wars and further terrorism these feelings will also fuel. The line between patriotism and nationalism is a thin one, and collective mourning feeds both.
But in the case of the pandemic, even Americans apparently are not “all Americans,” or rather some are less recognized in national kinship. The covid-19 dead are disproportionately urban, people of color, immigrants, the undocumented, the incarcerated, the elderly in nursing homes and state care facilities, the poor, the uninsured, the chronically ill, service workers and delivery people.
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