More spanish Flu and More Old Posts. Yes!

Interview with a scholar on the 1918 Spanish Flu and why it never really sunk into our collective memory:

Of course, that’s one of the reasons we have memorials to people who died in wars—to take something not quite tangible and turn it into something people can see. I think with diseases that can be difficult to do. Diseases often impact bodies in ways that are difficult to define. Viruses are invisible, contagion can often be tracked generally but not specifically. I think these are all things that feed into this.

It’s difficult to memorialize a pandemic, because disease makes people feel helpless, and there’s very little we can do to make meaning from it. With war, even if you disagree with the war, you could at least argue about whether the death was worth it. Did this sacrifice keep a soldier’s family safe? With an infectious disease, if you die, your family is more likely to die. There’s no sacrificial structure to build around a loss of this kind. It’s simply tragedy.

Besides the fact that the pandemic coincided with World War I, back in 2008 I formulated a theory, one that will probably be studied in every Ivy League school sometime in the future, about why we sometimes look past something so horrific:

9/11 was bad, sure; but what nobody wants to say out loud is that it wasn’t THAT bad. It was just bad enough for us as a country to embrace our very own “tragedy,” to give ourselves a JFK Assassination date if you will. To give ourselves a reason to practice rituals of collective mourning. It was a tragedy, but it was small enough that we don’t mind commemorating it with any gift shop piece of crap that we can sell. I don’t see shot glasses with pictures of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and I certainly have never seen wifebeaters with INFLUENZA 1918: NEVER FORGET on them. Something that "real" I guess it's easier to just try and forget it. Anything "real enough," we love to collectively hurl ourselves on the casket during the funeral and cause a scene.