Just a few weeks into the U.S. outbreak of coronavirus, I wrote a column that cautioned against what I felt were somewhat glib comparisons to 9/11. It was at the end of March, you’ll recall, that headlines alerted us to the first of many grim statistics: COVID-19 had killed more than 3,000 Americans, a death toll in excess of the 2001 terror attacks that brought down the Twin Towers.
Months later, I’m staring at an estimate of approximately 191,000 deaths. In California, where I live, we confirmed 3,000 new cases just yesterday, and some of those will eventually move to the casualty column. One reason we have struggled to properly grieve these losses, apart from the restrictions a pandemic places on funerary services, is the indefinite span of the crisis. It isn’t over, and we don’t know if or when it ever will be. Conversely, the events of 9/11 unfolded in a few short, stunning hours, now fixed in the amber of memory as the synonym of that once unmeaningful date. It was not only the visual bloom but the horrific speed of al-Qaeda’s mass murder that crystallized it as a blow to the national psyche. It ended almost before it began.
Maybe this helps to explain why those who flirt with COVID trutherism — downplaying the danger of the virus, claiming the numbers are inflated, writing off thousands of dead as invalids close to expiring anyway — are nonetheless so militant about the memorial customs for the nearly 3,000 who perished on 9/11. (For the record, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced shortly after reports of its cancelation that New York City’s “Tribute in Light” would go on as usual.)
If they’re lying about COVID numbers in here FL, inflating them 10x, imagine what they’ll do with Dem absentee ballots.
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) July 14, 2020
9/11 'Tribute in Light' memorial canceled
@BilldeBlasio really is a horrible creature. https://t.co/Y29TbwC9mM
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) August 14, 2020
Kinda weird we haven’t heard much of the @Marlins players & how they are feeling since testing positive for #Covid_19. Must not be all that bad…or we sure would have heard about it from #FakeNews.
— Aubrey Huff (@aubrey_huff) August 3, 2020
.@NYGovCuomo has canceled the 9/11 ‘Tribute in light Memorial.’ But is allowing the MTV video music awards in New York. Andrew Cuomo has officially gone full retard.
— Aubrey Huff (@aubrey_huff) August 14, 2020
Dems & the fake news sqwack about high # of cases, using fear to persuade the people that @realDonaldTrump is bad & socialism is the cure.
Ignoring the FACTS that MOST people won’t die from Covid-19 & Trump’s response has been #1 in the world, Dems just lie. https://t.co/maZXSJukZS— Marjorie Taylor Greene For Congress?? (@mtgreenee) August 19, 2020
Bill de Blasio has announced today that he is cancelling the 9/11 “Tribute in light” over ‘coronavirus concerns’
He’s let rioters destroy NYC for the past 2.5 months but he can’t show respect to the families of the brave first responders & other victims?
Disgraceful.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene For Congress?? (@mtgreenee) August 14, 2020
Almost 20 years after 9/11, it seems fruitless to observe yet again that right-wingers have an openly fetishistic relationship with that moment in history, which gave us a generation of seething Islamophobia, forever wars in the Middle East and a surveillance police state at home. It would be equally tiresome to complain of their trademark hypocrisy — that while it’s “Never Forget” for the victims of 9/11, it’s “This Isn’t Happening” for anyone currently suffering the consequences of our botched response to a contagious pathogen, and “Oh Well” for everybody it’s already killed, as well as their friends and loved ones.
But to sum this all up anyway: It’s never been so plain that to the conservative mind, some deaths leave an important wound, and others are only statistics. If your demise does not serve the mythos, it has to be suppressed.
9/11 tmrw I just wanna say never forget. Never Forget that 3000 people died during that tragedy and it changed our country forever while 150 thousand+ ppl have died from Covid and our government has done nothing since there’s no developing country to blame this on and invade
— first-mate prance (@bocxtop) September 10, 2020
COVID-19 has killed more police officers this year than all other causes combined, data shows.
By one estimate, coronavirus deaths among law enforcement are likely to surpass those of 9/11.https://t.co/MIxojIXXdg
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 3, 2020
They’re testing the 9/11 memorial lights over the WTC tonight. I’ve always found it a beautiful tribute. But if it stands for 3,000 deaths, we’d need 60 more to speak to our US COVID deaths—8 more for the NYC dead alone. A stark reminder of our dearth of coronavirus mourning. pic.twitter.com/OJCQbDsqmg
— Dr. Steven W. Thrasher (@thrasherxy) September 3, 2020
In Osama Bin Laden and his jihadist network, we had an enemy responsible for a singular assault on American soil. Whether the U.S. government failed to anticipate the threat (remember that Donald Trump has criticized George W. Bush on that pretext) was tangential to the opportunity for swift and brutal revenge. With the crisis of COVID-19, there is no one to blame but ourselves, and therefore, no incentive for the right to acknowledge the deceased. Rather perversely, one could imagine a scenario in which Trump and his surrogates had more success in painting China as the villain of this story, and a foreign power with the blood of our fair citizens, but that would have required both a commitment to war and disclosing the actual risks of infection, neither of which was in the offing.
And while 9/11 ceremonies are staged for all the fallen, there is a special emphasis on the police and firefighters who died in the line of duty that day; in 2020, doctors and nurses on the front lines of the pandemic are denounced as complicit in a hoax or worse. Without a cast of heroes to revere for their ultimate sacrifice — that is, absent the narrative logic of warriorhood and visceral hazard — there can be no crying bald eagles or flag-waving “resilience.” An invisible germ is not a burning, collapsing skyscraper.
The horror of this day must never be forgotten. pic.twitter.com/WNZ53y6YG9
— PragerU (@prageru) September 10, 2020
"What is scarier to you: a virus with a survivability rate of 99.9%, or hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of children being raped?" @TimBallard pic.twitter.com/awsLoImNK3
— PragerU (@prageru) August 8, 2020
Nobody in this country, least of all the self-styled patriot, would tolerate a diminishing of what happened on 9/11, or the human agony it entailed. The anniversary rituals are calibrated against exactly that. Neither would we listen to someone who argues that most of the victims belonged to a “high-risk” group because they worked in a particularly tall building, or that 3,000 deaths is less than a tenth of our annual car accident fatalities.
The very act of contrast is taboo, since there is a lone accepted context for 9/11, and that is 9/11. Coronavirus, meanwhile, started out as an ambient circumstance, the illness spreading to individuals through space and time, some of them added to a mounting figure as they succumb to their symptoms, that tally then further abstracted and rationalized to appease an audience that has no use for the raw information.
At least 188K people have died of COVID in the U.S. Wed. (9/16) we will honor those lost with a 2 hr online vigil beginning @ 12pm CT. During our #WeGrieveTogether vigil we'll share artwork memorializing the fallen and embrace collective grief. Learn more: https://t.co/if7NgDlgfg pic.twitter.com/fWCs3MCZ6W
— Puff the Magic Hater (@MsKellyMHayes) September 10, 2020
As we mark 19 years since our collective fantasy was shattered in a way that could not be ignored, we should also think forward. In the future, we will need to remember the people whose painful departure from this world amounted to a colossal trauma that many did not see as real. Any memorial must include this discordance — a confession of the popular effort to twist, censor and silence the gravest of truths. A pronouncement that it is and was political defiance to say: I mourn a parent, a partner, a sibling, a child, a friend, and they were killed by a system that didn’t care, that destroyed our bodies to save itself.
At root, the refusal to meet this disaster on its own terms is an unwillingness to fix the injustices that made it worse. If we owe anything to our pandemic dead, it is to challenge American decay with a movement that bears their names.