This was written by my friend and frequent commenter here, Elizabeth Moon. She wrote it as a letter to me and I asked to share it with y’all because she is on the edge of a game changing idea.
Newsweek has reported that body bags have been left on the steps of two GOP Senators (McConnell & Graham). As you know, I wrote a fictional story back in the summer about a group intercepting trucks carrying corpses from hospital parking lots and parking them in front of Senators’ homes in their states, so I’m definitely in favor of upsetting GOP Senators. But one reason I wrote the story as I did (the trucks had images of the dead inside, along with a short bio) is that making the body bags *personal* is what would work better politically and socially. Because COVID patients are isolated once admitted to a hospital, nobody sees them but exhausted hospital staff…and when they’r intubated and sedated, their faces are obscured as much as the masked and face-shielded staff members are. They’re judged and described by GOPpersons in lumps (elderly, Blacks, Hispanics, health care workers, obese…) and blamed (instead of COVID) for their weight, their existing conditions, etc., anything to avoid facing the reality that they weren’t, for the most part, going to die this year until they got COVID-19.
Body bags are a good shocking “stop and look” visual, but along with that there needs to be a way to personalize every one of those bags, because every one represents a real person, alive this time last year, who isn’t alive this year, because of this pandemic AND the gross mismanagement of it by the GOP across the country. Not just Trump, not just McConnell, not just the Senate, but every governor and state legislator and mayor and city council that did not push to face facts and do the right thing. We need something that puts faces…not in obituaries in the back pages of newspapers, but up front, in color, with bios, not death-os. Like the AIDS quilt. That says who we lost and what that means to where they came from. Not just health care workers (though that’s a critical group, yes) but all those people in meat packing plants, in warehouses, in big box and no-box stores, bus drivers and taxi drivers, fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, people who opened the store in the morning or closed it in the evening, librarians, teachers, plumbers, electricians, garbage truck workers, students, campers…and right now they’re all being talked about either as just numbers, or as people whose lifestyle choices (hate that term) or “social choices” (ditto) makes them seem to deserve it.
I haven’t a clue how to do this…I can’t sew, I don’t have a circle of friends who sew, so no quilt-making for me. Right now I can’t get to my Twitter or my Facebook account and I”m trying hard to finish the editing of the new book by the end of the year. You’ve been an actual journalist–how can papers and TV stations be persuaded to personalize the deaths, show how the fabric of society is being shredded? Maybe it’s not doable, but…(going back to chapter seven…muttering to self…just do the damn job, E, you know you’re crap at “platform” stuff, just do what you can do.)
(If you’re not familiar with Elizabeth, she’s kinda a big deal. Go look her up on Amazon and give yourself some stunning guilty pleasure for Christmas.)
