queer_scribbling | Article: Few signs of collective mourning as the US tops 170,000 coronavirus deaths (Reply)

Link Embed: "Few signs of collective mourning as the US tops 170,000 coronavirus deaths" (August 2020).

One of my irritations with the piece is that it appears to ignore digital collective mourning, and while I can understand why there might be a difference of opinion in whether that's more meaningful to a large group compared to in-person methods, it's still happening, especially with restrictions on in-person gatherings.

While I understand the comparison to 9/11 on a certain level when talking about [US] nationwide collective mourning and traumatic loss that isn't specific to a certain location, I've personally hit a point where I'm tired of comparisons to 9/11. Often, first responders get talked about, or you might hear about the passengers on Flight 93. Holding up certain people as heroes means that there's unequal media attention and focus of mourning.

In fact, it wasn't until late May, with the death toll nearing 100,000, that flags on federal buildings would be lowered to half-staff to honor coronavirus victims and members of the military.

No offense, but that's not what I consider collective mourning. Personally, I don't care what happens to flags right now. I thought that was the type of thing that was traditionally only done for one-day national observances and out of respect for certain people who have died recently (for example, John Lewis). I thought collective mourning involves the people, the average non-military citizens, doing something.

Still, focusing solely on Washington's response to the pandemic would be letting the American public broadly off the hook, McElya said.

Then why focus so much on the Trump administration in this section? Did you look at #NamingTheLost or #WeGrieveTogether? Both events happened in May, and this piece was written in August. Or are digital means of mourning not being counted here?

[...] another factor contributing to the lack of a shared sense of grief is that marginalized groups, particularly people of color, have been disproportionately affected by the crisis.

Yeah, I do think that the US death toll having a majority of PoC probably does contribute to an apparent lack of collective mourning when trying to ask why everyone in the US isn't joining in, but that gets into a generalized indifference on the part of white people and comes across as overlooking what communities of color are doing to mourn their dead.

"I think Black Lives Matter is in some ways about mourning," she said. "They were mourning those lives, standing for the value of those lives, publicly gathering in sorrow and in rage... I think that is a public act of mourning at the same time that it is a public act of protest."

(Yes.)

"At some level, we are grieving much that we cannot even easily name, and for which there are no rituals of support," Neimeyer said. "There's no High Mass offered for your loss of security, or there's no ritual by which we bury or inter a career or a job that we lost."

Someone hasn't heard of shadow work.

The trauma is compounded by the fact that no end to the pandemic appears in sight.

I think this is one reason why I have such a strong dislike to the 9/11 comparison because that was a one-day event. All of 2020 has been encompassed by a variety of traumas, grieving, and mourning. It's also a bit difficult for some people to really sit down with their grief and try to express it in some public means of mourning when they're just concentrating on survival. Like, that is a coping mechanism, and it very well might contribute to some people - magnified across the whole US population - not jumping straight into collective mourning, y'know?

"It leads us to accept deaths that are preventable ... and it makes us cold, if not cruel, in the face of calculated levels of acceptable death."

Hm. The human brain generally does not like trauma, and it will do a whole bunch of maneuvers to try to avoid accepting the deaths of people directly in our lives and that we know, who are 'in our face' with their absence. Perhaps I'm already cold, but there's something about this that seems unrealistic to living with constant access to news to hear about tragedies that are not local, tragedies that get politicized, mass death events that aren't acceptable to everyone but change still hasn't happened, and deaths that point to systemic issues.