When copies of the Sunday Times were delivered to the store last night, I had to catch my breath.
I’d never seen a front page like it. A list of 1,000 names of people felled by the corona virus. One percent of the total dead. A nationwide obituary.
I handed the paper to a couple of other employees. The first said, “That’s crazy!” The second just frowned.
I decided not to show it to anyone else.
Do my coworkers not care or do they not want to think about it? The question is presumptuous, I realize.
Conversations before the pandemic indicated that many of the people I work with either don’t vote or support a president who has done little to reduce the losses from COVID-19.
For some, the only way to continue to work in a grocery store these days may be to shut one’s mind to danger and grief. But turning a blind eye gets us nowhere.
This isn’t close to being over. Those of us who are lucky enough to escape the disease, who don’t yet know anyone who has succumbed to it, are fools to believe we can live in that bubble indefinitely.
I’m grateful to the Times for its dramatic statement. At a time when we can’t hold proper funerals, it’s a commemoration long overdue and a responsibility that should have been borne by our national leaders.
The death toll, far greater than that of the polio epidemic, far greater than that of the flu to which it is often compared, is a fact that can’t be ignored. It’s a shared tragedy we have to acknowledge.