Today, Explained - Why America needs a national pandemic memorial

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

People want to move on from Covid-19, but that doesn’t mean forgetting its victims. Historian Paul Farber and Vox reporter Alissa Wilkinson explain why a memorial could help us all heal and find accountability. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. My great-great-grandmother, Esther, grew up in Eastern Europe and spent the later years of her life in South Philadelphia. She naturalized at the immigration station on Washington Avenue, which was kind of like Philadelphia's Ellis Island point of entry for mostly Eastern European immigrants

at the turn of the 20th century. She settled a few blocks away with her family. In 1918, my great-great-grandmother Esther died. She died in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and died in the midst of caring for family. I knew some of the details, but it really kind of floated through family lore. There wasn't a big reference point, not just in our own family,

but in our culture about what that pandemic meant for life in the city. So, you know, at the onset of our pandemic, I had a conversation with organizers of an exhibition here in Philadelphia, the Mütter Museum, who had opened an exhibition a year before our most recent pandemic about the thousands of lives lost in Philadelphia in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. They had pulled death certificates from anyone who had died of influenza or related causes, and it was in conversation with one of their curators that they presented me with this record of my great-great-grandmother. It says she passed away in October of 1918 of pneumonia that was onset from influenza.

It lists her family members. It lists where she was buried. What I was gathering about the past in my family was that a group of, at that point, fairly recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living in South Philadelphia were caring for themselves and their neighbors in a city that didn't have the big picture plans to deal with the public health crisis, especially in vulnerable communities. So it felt uncanny to that moment of discovery and the current pandemic we're in, to see that the story of a public health crisis that really falls upon vulnerable residents

to care for themselves and their neighbors. It felt uncanny. Paul Farber is a historian and director of the Monument Lab. It's a public art and history studio based in Philadelphia. Until COVID-19, the 1918 pandemic was kind of a historical footnote for Americans. There are no national monuments, no statues in front of federal buildings, no vast parks calling us to remember it. Today on the show, we're going to talk about why,

and why we should think about commemorating COVID-19 differently. More than 675,000 Americans died of influenza in the 1918 pandemic. I've read in places that if you judge that based on same number of soldiers died in World War I of flu complications as they did in battle. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of World War I monuments and markers and other forms of popular remembrance that aren't just in bronze and marble,

movies, TV series. But the story of the pandemic that hit at the same time, again, it's not an untold history. It just hasn't risen to the same level. And there's, I think, a lot of reasons for that. I mean, one of them is we have a history of telling the story of battle and of war in public more than we do most other occurrences. For a long time, we've been really putting a spotlight on conflict over the kind of everyday realities and complications of living in this country. So the memorials that we do have to conflicts like World War I, what impact do they have on the public? In different communities, in different time periods, there's a kind of all kinds of other imperatives that inform. For example, you may have seen war memorials that list out the names of individual soldiers or medics who from a given community lost their lives. And if you live in a

small town, even if it's several dozen names, it registers because you may recognize the last name or understand them in the context of the family. In other cases, there's the incorporation actually of artillery or cannons or other kinds of instruments of war. But you generally, what you would see is kind of the transfer of the experience of war and that sense of loss transformed into something else. And it's meant to be a place of remembrance, of healing, but far too often they're hard to upkeep. The very form kind of invites being still and frozen in time and the end of a sentence, so to speak, rather than a place of continuation and bridge forward. I mean, there is another, you know, after World War II, you would see a expansion of the kind of living memorial, veterans parks, veterans highways, veterans stadiums,

the idea that veterans wanted life to go on as well. It seems like memorials have a lot of controversy just baked into them because they sort of take a position on who was a force of good or who was a force of bad or who deserves to be remembered. Absolutely. Those with more power, those with more money, those with more time, build monuments that are important to them. But we also know that if you don't have the time, the money, the official power, you gather next to monuments that exist or you build your own. And so I think what's important as we, look, if you walk around your neighborhood or your town, I would imagine you're already seeing COVID memorials in some

kind of way. It might be a candle lit in a windowsill. It might be a sign for frontline workers or sanitation workers on someone's lawn. We're already seeing it because we're already doing it. One of the ways that we cope and survive and move forward is by grieving and making space for mourning and understanding that that's part of our everyday condition. The pandemic, you know, some people called as the great equalizer. And I think instead, you know, it's a great revealer of existing fault lines, the deep socioeconomic and racial disparities in mortality and healthcare, the systemic racism that put Black Americans at great risk, disproportionately facing higher casualty counts, the deep-seated anti-Asian racism that we're seeing now, the effect on

women and their labor, these are all part of this pandemic. So if we try to boil down public memory to the heroes and the foes, we're going to only superficially numb this collective pain, and we're going to fail to be able to address those fault lines that existed before COVID, you know, this is an opportunity that we have to meet to be able to do better so that we can really do the work of recovery. If there was a memorial for the 1918 flu, what do you think it would have done for your great-grandmother's family or her descendants? 1918 flu pandemic was on the city of Philadelphia and really give us a sense of the groups of immigrants and African-American migrants and workers who were deeply impacted and didn't always have a chance to get out of their immediate neighborhoods or had to do great work if they did survive to care for their friends, loved ones, and neighbors. So I'd want to see that on a citywide level.

But I think on the more neighborhood, street by street, family by family, an understanding of what life was like in that moment. That's the information I wish we knew more about. So it really would have informed how we could have gone about our early days of the pandemic now. Paul Farber is the director of the Monument Lab in Philadelphia. Coming up, we may not have a national monument yet, but people are still finding ways to remember COVID-19.

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to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. BetMGM.com. A sportsbook worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager.

Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Alyssa Wilkinson, you're a film critic and culture reporter at Vox, and you recently wrote about memorials and people who lost loved ones to COVID. As more and more Americans get vaccinated,

how are these people thinking about moving forward while also remembering those that passed away? Yeah, there's a big tension between those two things. Part of it is that grief is delayed. So if you lost someone and then you had a socially distant Thanksgiving that didn't really feel like Thanksgiving, then the first Thanksgiving where their seat is empty is still in front of you, which means that we'll be experiencing some of this loss and grief for a much longer period than we might have. The

effects are going to be different. And as much as everyone wants to move on from this and, you know, everyone's been affected whether or not they've lost someone, you know, do you want to move on if you're afraid that people are going to forget your loved one? And one big reason this could happen is that so many people have died that the individuals risk becoming just kind of one in a group. So there's some kind of need to bring the past into the present and preserve it for the future. And I think that's what a lot of people are grappling with. On the other hand, I talked to a woman named Lisa who lost her father who was living in an assisted living facility. She said she's tired of death and wants to celebrate life. And that's a refrain that you hear a lot from people who are grieving as well. My dad, in his facility at the assisted

living, when he moved in, there was a little small greenhouse at the end of his hallway. And they bought the dirt for him and he wanted to grow tomatoes. And that was really who he was. That's what I'm going to think about. When I go in a grocery store and I look at some beautiful produce, you know, whether it's an eggplant or a watermelon, that's going to keep him alive to me. I will think of him every time. How have other memorials struck that balance between moving forward and remembering the past, which might still make them really sad or really angry? The tendency, especially I think for Americans, is to try and put it in the past behind us to not remember the failures that brought us to this place. So we have a lot of accountability that we

need to find in these memorials. There are some examples of that in the country. I think one notable example is in Montgomery, Alabama. A few years ago, the Equal Justice Initiative opened a memorial called the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It's on six acres and it draws a line from slavery through lynching and racial terror to remember and to make present those ancestors, those foremothers and forefathers who made this place and so many places in our country sacred by the sacrifice of their blood. We gather to remember all those whose names are known, but we also gather to remember those whose names are known only by their God. And we have equality. If you go there, the centerpiece are these giant six-foot pillars. Each of them is for a county where a lynching took place,

and there are names inscribed on those pillars of people who were lynched in those counties. And the idea is that we're going to boldly tell the truth about what happened and make sure that their lives don't slip away because it's episodes that we would prefer to imagine never happened or to forget. Because that doesn't say something good about us. And I think COVID in some ways is the same in that there's a lot of dark truths about us that have been exposed during this time about how we deal with each other, about how we

deal with limits on our freedom, preparedness of our government, all these different things. We might wish they were in the past. So a memorial will hopefully make it more possible for the future to remember what happened. What types of COVID-19 memorials have you seen emerging so far? of a wave and an urn and it's a tsunami of grief, right? But it's overwhelming and it also points to kind of the silliness in some ways of what we've been forced to process, right? We're doing so much through text messages and Zoom windows and there's an odd triteness to this time of grief. An example in Washington, D.C., an artist named Robin Bell was projecting photos and messages of mourning onto a building. So, you know, that's huge and hard to miss if you're near the building. And it would sort of cycle through different messages. There's actually a Twitter account that I've been

following called Faces of COVID. And every day they post a bunch of obituaries for people who've passed away from COVID. And if you watch it go through your feed all day, you see the obituary and then you see family members and loved ones reply to it. So it's like a living memorial to them. And even just as recently as late February, the National Cathedral in Washington told its bells 500 times, each of which was representing a thousand deaths. Wow. Yeah. And they're all pretty ethereal in their nature too. What do the people who lost someone to COVID-19 want from a more permanent memorial? So one thing that's come up a lot is that memorials of the future to COVID-19 victims and just to this time need to be solid and physical. I talked to a guy named Josh whose uncle died.

We need something we can negotiate in a physical space as a reminder that there were people here. This is a huge loss. I also talked to a lot of people who cited trees and plants. So I had it pictured in my mind, just a large, huge, it would have to be huge, public garden in memory with all, you know, every kind of plant for each season, winding paths for everybody to go, you know, benches to sit on. I'm thinking particularly of the Huntington Gardens in California. And also to let public volunteer organizations, because they want to,

choose to tend a section of it. And in some odd way, this would represent to me the first line workers because they were tending my daddy in all of those. A lot of this has to do with the feeling of new life, of enduring life that comes back year after year, that life kind of goes on. There's also a sense with trees that they weather a lot of storms and they have deep roots. And sometimes they break through concrete and through stones. And so that idea of life emerging from something hugely difficult is a really important part to a lot of people. So, you know, one big significant part of this is simply that this touched every corner of the country. And so finding ways to memorialize them centrally in a public way, but also where they were to say,

you know, we were here, we didn't disappear. That's a really important part. I think that that loss of time, of relationships, of memories, of holidays we didn't get to have together. All of those things, even if we made the best of it, are things we will be grieving. And in a memorial, we would need space for us to come and be angry and to be sad and to feel grief and to also recognize that we went through this together. We finished it. We came out the other side, and there are lessons that we learned that we can hold on to and that we can hold the powerful to account. Alyssa Wilkinson is a film critic for Vox.

I'm Halima Shah filling in for Sean Ramosforum, who will be back with us next week. It's Today Explained. Thanks for listening.