How the COVID Crisis Exposed An Utter Inability for Americans to Collectively Agree

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Americans struggle to collectively agree on basic facts surrounding the COVID pandemic, as evidenced by the prevalence of misinformation about the vaccines causing sudden deaths. This inability to agree poses a challenge for creating a national memorial for the pandemic, as a memorial ultimately requires a national consensus on the event's significance. The complexity of opinions and beliefs surrounding COVID is highlighted by the lack of awareness and varied responses to the idea of a national COVID Memorial Day, showing the difficulty in finding a unified interpretation of the pandemic's impact.

When a highway gets made, there’s a clear and consistent process for doing so. Not so, public memorials. From the Vietnam Wall to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, it’s always different. Sometimes a handful of concerned citizens get together and make it happen. Sometimes a nonprofit pushes for it, or a foundation. There’s usually a lot of activism, and a lot of fraught conversations – about design, location, the story it should tell about what happened, and who it affected.

And how does one memorialize such a vast and distributed tragedy like COVID-19, which was devastating physically but also divisive politically?

Don't Forget to Remember

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