Frikitiki Productions/Creative Commons
Unsanitized-052520
Flags are flying at half staff Monday.
A few days ago I learned that Ward Harkavy, a longtime editor for alt-weeklies like the Denver Westword and the Village Voice, died from COVID-19. I didn’t know Ward; he was a name that would pop up in my Twitter notifications from time to time. His friends and colleagues spoke highly of him as a take-no-bullshit newspaper man born in Oklahoma, a mentor to many writers and a pretty damn good one on his own. I only interacted with him a handful of times, as part of the social media blur. I wish I’d gotten to know him.
There are just about 100,000 people like this in America, and if we’re honest about the undercounted numbers served up by state and local governments, many more than that. They are casualties of the nation’s largest mass death event since World War II (it will likely pass WWI sometime in June). I feel like I have heard the personal life stories of everyone who died on 9/11. There’s an enormous wall in Washington with the names of every casualty of the Vietnam War. Go to many cities in this country and you’ll see a similar memorial for the local soldiers who died in prior wars.
I don’t know whether there ever will be such a wall constructed for the victims of coronavirus, or if we’ll ever get more than a cursory reflection on whom we’ve lost, more than a one-line tribute and an obit in the back of a dead-tree newspaper. I do know that we’ve utterly failed to this point at showing any semblance of honor.
This day, Memorial Day, is intended to mark the dead. Over the weekend I had occasion to pass the Federal Building in West Los Angeles and the nearby sprawling VA campus. Both locations flew flags at half-staff, because the political leadership belatedly decided that it would be a good time to take note of those lost from an unfolding tragedy that most of us have decided to suppress. On Tuesday, those flags will go back up and we’ll go back to failing the dead.
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I count myself among the failed. We have been doing this Unsanitized report for two and a half months. I’ve diligently chronicled the economic fallout of the crisis, the extreme damage unfolding for workers, for renters and mortgage borrowers, for the millions finding themselves newly jobless. That economic depression will play out for years and touch many more lives than the coronavirus snuffed out. And I’ve chronicled the public health disaster, the pressure mounting at hospitals, the need to transport equipment. I’ve talked about the dead in aggregate, back when we hit 50,000 deaths last month. I even asked for and received your stories of the victims you knew, and how you remembered them.
I haven’t done enough. The dead have piled up so fast, it became impossible to make sense of and personalize the tragedy day by day. Outside of a few musicians and actors and notable people, we aren’t memorializing the husbands and wives, mothers and grandmothers, doctors and nurses and patients, old and young, who have passed on. The lack of more than a pro forma utterance from the President of the United States about the loss of life is beyond despicable, but sadly we’re all kind of numb. This time of contagion has postponed most funeral services, most public expressions of grief. People are dying alone and head to their resting place alone. New York City initially enlisted prisoners to bury its dead on Hart’s Island temporarily; public outcry led to the end of the prison labor, not the burying.
The New York Times’ mini-portraits of 1/100th of the fallen was as incomplete as it was solemn. The only thing we’re experiencing together as Americans is Zoom, not mourning. We’re having national rallies about whether we can get back to having brunch again, and we’re looking down our nose at those congregating at beaches and pools. We fight about the numbers but we don’t consider the humans behind them.
We aren’t thinking about those who died and maybe it’s too horrible to think about. Maybe the lack of physical evidence of death, outside of the sirens that haunt me when I hear them periodically in Los Angeles, is abstracting away the suffering, the way that censored photos of flag-draped caskets during the height of the Iraq war abstracted away the pain onto Gold Star mothers and the narrow slice of Americans chosen to sacrifice. Maybe we’re wrapped up in our personal turmoil, the burdens financial and social, getting crabby about staying at home. Maybe we haven’t seen 100,000 deaths in three months and don’t know what to say or do about it.
We turn away to other important side effects, and those will matter too, maybe to a historic degree if the nation slides into depression. Preventing more deaths can take on more significance, and the steps to doing so (both medicinal and procedural, with contact tracing and isolating and treatments complementing one another) must be studied and analyzed.
But without keeping the dead atop our thoughts, we’re just transferring political fights to the crisis. The reason we’ve obliterated our economy and upended our lives is because people like Ward Harkavy, a hundred thousand people like him, are dying from a contagious respiratory disease. And many more will die. And we should say their names and salute their lives once in a while.
