Gratitude Monday: Honored dead

It’s Memorial Day, the national day dedicated to the remembrance of those who gave their lives in service to the country. For more than 150 years, the “service” has been specific to the military, but this year it seems much broader than that.

I don’t recall such an extension on Memorial Day of 2002—perhaps because the 3000 or so lost during the 9/11 attacks had been dead for eight months, and we were ramping up another hot war. This time, we’ve recorded 100,000 deaths in the last three months, and the meter’s still running.

(The numbers of both cases and mortalities are almost certainly underreported, for many reasons, both administrative and political.)

For years, the Washington Post printed the names and photos of servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whenever they had enough deaths to fill up the double-page center of the front section, they’d publish them. I don’t suppose many in the Shrub administration paid much attention, but it was important for people to see the names and faces of the fallen.

Yesterday the New York Times filled its entire front page with the names of as many covid19 victims as they could; one thousand. Names, ages, location. For some of the dead, they also include brief insights into their lives—sang in her choir, saved Jewish families from the Nazis, liked his bacon and hash browns crispy.

Inside the edition, Dan Barry writes, “Imagine a city of 100,000 residents that was here for New Year’s Day but has now been wiped from the American map.”

That city is going to increase in population before we’re done this year; before we’re even done with the summer. And almost all of the deaths will have been needless, the direct result of our national government abdicating its duty to the citizens who elected them.

So on this Memorial Day, as the toll mounts, I am grateful for the journalists and editors who do their damned job, reminding us that the statistics—whatever kind of “per capita” matters to you—were lives cut short. They were mothers, grandfathers, sisters, sons; gifts to their families, friends and communities. They are lost to us now, and we need to remember that.