9/5/2023 0 Comments Bookinist ny online bookstoreAt Queens College, a commemorative plaque has been affixed to a stone. One honoring the first sanitation worker to die of Covid made the rounds of department facilities before its fixed installation outside a garage on Spring Street in Manhattan. Some New Yorkers have erected permanent markers to the city’s fallen. If you spent the pandemic in rural Montana logging into Parler for intelligence, however, you may continue to insist that the whole thing was a hoax. If you live in a city where the sirens screamed day and night, you could not deny reality 900,000 New Yorkers each lost at least three people they loved. Almost 104 million cases were reported in the US and more than a million people died. Not all of us even agree that there was a pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that nearly 6 percent of US adults are still suffering from long Covid, and more than a thousand US residents are dying weekly. The Biden administration declared the national public health emergency over on May 11, three years after the red states began lifting restrictions on such necessary institutions as tattoo parlors and casinos, and President Trump congratulated the pastors who kept packing their churches as the virus raced among the parishioners. We do not concur on when, or even whether, it ended. We still do not know how it started or who, if anyone, to blame. Even had the Trump administration not seized the crisis as another nation-fracturing opportunity, how were we to come together when we were not even allowed to breathe on each other?Įverything about the pandemic remains in dispute. The fellow-feeling and collaboration common during mass calamities-Rebecca Solnit’s paradises in hell-could not materialize. Some people-the uninsured, the incarcerated, the Black and brown, the expendable “essential” worker-experienced a different pandemic from those who waited it out in the Hamptons. Mutual protection meant keeping our six-foot distance. So far, the Covid-19 pandemic has satisfied neither of these criteria. “The Many Losses of Covid-19,” a public art memorial installation at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, May 20, 2023 One does not have to be the enemy to be the Other. Critics note the absence from the Vietnam memorial of the three million Vietnamese casualties, including the US’s South Vietnamese allies in what they call the American War. War memorials implicitly define the group by excluding those who are not of it. The events commemorated by a public memorial, moreover, must have happened to a group-a tribe, a community, a nation-or created a group in happening. Everyone can see their own reflection in the polished black granite. Yet the impassive wall invites the same gesture from nearly every visitor: to place a hand on it, to touch a few, if not a special one, of the 58,281 names inscribed there. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., evinces patriotic pride for some, renews rage for others. The best monuments of remembrance, in fact, are those that inspirit collective emotion while accommodating disparate interpretations. A public memorial requires, at minimum, a shared memory-a consensus that something significant happened, if not necessarily what that something meant.
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