Wednesday, March 23, 2022

How to honor the COVID dead?

Stephen Blackwelder, conductor of the DePaul Community Chorus. Also onstage is the       
                    Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago, which plays with the chorus.

     Should we honor the COVID dead?
     The current tally for the United States is 972,000 and climbing by 1,200 a day. At this rate, we’ll hit 1 million Americans dead of COVID-19 sometime in mid-April.
     Do we memorialize the fallen? And if so, how?
     Uncomfortable questions. Americans are used to solemnizing those who die in wars. They have their own day. (Sigh. It’s Memorial Day.) And while some Americans visit graves, in general the holiday is marked with ball games, blowout sales and potato salad.
     Some countries have national moments of silence. I’ve been in Israel during their Memorial Day, Yom HaZikaron, and at the appointed moment people stop driving and stand outside their cars, heads bowed, for a two-minute moment of silence.
     Silence is not a very American concept. We’re more into physical monuments. My hometown had a statue to a Union soldier on a plinth in its downtown triangle, a silent sentinel that I never associated with anyone dying until now.
     The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a sprawl of low walls and stumpy columns and burbling pools that I would be hard-pressed to envision in my mind’s eye, and I was there. More a fancy marble skatepark than a memorial.
     The gold standard for war memorials is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a black granite gash in the earth with the names of the 58,000 American military who died in that brutal, grinding war.
     Should we try to do something similar for the COVID million, victims of another conflict that divided our country? Hard to imagine. Maybe there is an artist or architect who can put the plague years into meaningful shape and mold public perceptions as Maya Lin did.


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10 comments:

  1. What about hanging T**** from a tree & then dipping him in bronze as the memorial.
    Because he's the one really responsible for this disaster!
    He denied it was bad, he pushed useless shit like drinking bleach & sticking a UV light up your ass, plus of course the equally worthless, ivermectin!

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    1. well I dont now about all that clark st.

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  2. Agree regarding the WWII “memorial”. The little I was able to learn from my father about that war was not found there.
    The Korean War Memorial is every bit as sobering as LIn’s creation. The vacant stares of the freezing, bigger than life soldiers slogging up the hill tells it all.
    I appreciate Neil’s optimism but I’m not convinced our nation can be healed.
    The wounds may be too deep and the system too broken.

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    1. We're so divided about so much else that we would undoubtedly fight over proposals for the memorial to the million-plus Covid dead as well. That's 21st-century America--someone is always pissed about something, or bitching about it. There's no one-size-fits-all anymore, except for baseball caps, and even those aren't worn correctly a lot of the time.

      People would argue and debate and have hissy-fits over the choices presented, and even then, too many people would disparage and denigrate the final selection. And too many would call it an atrocity and an abortion in granite...a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a monument to wokeness and the flu.

      So maybe it's better to just shelve the whole idea, Mr. S...but it's good to see that your heart is in the right place, even if America's probably isn't. If history is any example, most folks who didn't lose anybody over the last two years are probably ready to just forget the whole megillah. Except for a small and almost unknown monument in Vermont, there is no physical commemoration of the 1918-20 pandemic, either.

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  3. The gold standard for war memorials is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a black granite gash in the earth with the names of the 58,000 American military who died in that brutal, grinding war.

    It's maybe worth pointing out how controversial that design was when it was first proposed. The criticism reached its nadir with one shithead, a member of Reagan's cabinet, fuming that it would be an insult to the dead troops to have anyone with Asian heritage design the memorial.

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    1. It is indeed (I didn't because, well, a column can't be about everything). I also touched on the issue last year, when writing about Harry Weese's Hilliard Towers, quoting Ian Baldwin: "The Vietnam Memorial as we know it today would never have been built without him. After Maya Lin’s entry board to the 1981 competition had been rejected, Weese, always uneasy with final decisions or consensus, dragged it out from the rear of the airplane hangar where it had been consigned. He swayed the rest of the jury and later championed Lin in the face of intense criticism."

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  4. "Some countries have national moments of silence. I’ve been in Israel during their Memorial Day, Yom HaZikaron, and at the appointed moment people stop driving and stand outside their cars, heads bowed, for a two-minute moment of silence."

    This was probably a one-off event and I don't remember how widespread it was at the time, but after the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, I believe on that very evening, the CTA stopped all their trains in the middle of the evening rush hour for a moment of silence. I was riding my usual Evanston Express on the way home when we came to a full stop, and the PA system announced the moment of silence in honor of the fallen astronauts. We stood there in absolute silence for what I recall to be a full minute, and then we started up again, and that was that.

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    1. I rode the Evanston Express for decades, and it could easily have been just another signal delay, of which there were many. And there were still conductors then, so he may have simply acted on his own, and taken the opportunity to announce a moment of silence for the fallen astronauts.

      I believe it would have been very difficult for the CTA to orchestrate something like that, especially systemwide. But it has been done at least one time that I know of. All trains, buses, and streetcars did come to a temporary halt on the afternoon of FDR's funeral, in April of 1945.

      I was living in Rogers Park and working in Evanston in 1986, so I was not on the Evanston Express that day. This is the very first mention I've heard or read of such an ocurrence on that tragic and fateful day.

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    2. I agree that in my decades of riding the CTA and then Metra, that was a first, and if the conductor hadn't actually announced the purpose of the stop, it would have been just another unexplained delay.

      Back in 1986, I don't believe the CTA had the technical means to directly address the train passengers from a central broadcast point, so they sent the directives to the conductor of each train. I found this article in the Tribune archive from three days later which mentions it:

      "By Tuesday evening, memorials to the crew were underway.
      [...]
      As others did throughout the Chicago Transit Authority system Tuesday evening, the conductor of a southbound CTA train made an announcement to his rush-hour passengers at the busy Roosevelt Road stop.

      'A moment of silence,' came his voice over the train`s sound system, 'for the seven people who died.'"

      Ref: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-01-29-8601080027-story.html

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    3. Then they DID do it. I did not know that. I stand corrected.

      In those pre-computer days, the Merchandise Mart control center must have radioed the order to all bus drivers and train conductors. And told them to stop at a pre-arranged time.

      But on the afternoon of Saturday, April 14, 1945, the observances stretched far beyond Chicago's transit system. Stores closed...even grocery stores. At 4:00 Eastern time, when the services for FDR began, the wire service teletypes tapped out S I L E N C E. Buses and cars pulled over, and streetcars and trains stopped in their tracks. Airplanes either circled, or parked on runways. Radio stations went off the air. Phones went dead. All New York subway trains were motionless. Men removed their hats, and women knelt in prayer. America simply stopped. Can you imagine that ever happening again? Neither can I.

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