Asking For Ideas and Help
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.)
How about yard signs with photographs of people’s faces? Hundreds and hundreds of them on the legislators’ doorsteps, both in their home states and where they live in the DC area?
1Faces of the dead, printed on 8.5 x 11 paper, in a sheet protector lining every porch, window, whatever?
2The name and date of death of a COVID victim, embroidered or written with cloth paint, on a mask which is worn everywhere.
3Tell the stories we know. I deeply appreciate the courage of Ms Ivan. Cynthia Ivan is from Akiak, on the Kuskokwim River in Western Alaska. She wrote this account on Facebook about the death of her grandmother, Lucy Ivan, who had COVID-19. A slightly edited and expanded version is published here with the family’s permission.
4https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/2020/11/19/the-death-and-burial-of-our-dearest-mother-and-grandmother/
I was remembering the POW bracelets during the Vietnam War – that could be an option. Also, a button pin with a persons picture, name and birth/death date.
5Well, we do have a memorial for 9/11. This has been far more deadly. Maybe there can be a memorial in Washington to this. I know that doesn’t do much now since it would take years to be built, but maybe such a memorial could chronicle not only the human impact but the horrific decisions that led to it’s seriousness. Hopefully, the end result would help us prevent anything like this ever happening again.
6@Nick Carroway: There actually is a memorial of sorts. An artist bought 200,000 white flags on sticks and planted one for each COVID death on rhe grounds around RFK stadium.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/photos-artist-installs-more-than-200000-flags-in-dc-symbolizing-covid-19-deaths/2452480/
And this on the Ellipse:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/memorial-held-outside-white-house-in-solemn-reminder-of-more-than-200000-americans-killed-by-covid-19/2020/10/04/d6914098-0671-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html
These were both temporary, though.
7The BBC and NY Times stories that have included people talking about the family members they have lost to Covid – who they were and what they’ve lost with their deaths – have been quite moving. Locally, it’s been difficult to know cause of death – it’s not printed in the obits because of privacy issues.
My hope is that families will make this public, along with talking about what we lose with each of these deaths…and I do like the idea of photos & info…yard signs or paper in protective envelopes.
By the way, JJ, I’m half-way through Elizabeth’s first trilogy, and it’s a good read. Very well written and a great way to spend Covidtide!
8PBS Newshour, every Friday at the end of their show, tells stories about people who have passed, with photos, in words supplied by their families. It is heart wrenching every damn week. Every single news program, local and national, should do something like this.
9I have an idea. People found out about the quilt from the media of the 80s. Nowadays people choose the media they want, so that’s limited. But Facebook still has massive influence. A story I read said even people choosing Parler are staying on FB. They’ve become the behemoth they are by connecting people who never would’ve known about each other. Who else would be better at showing everyone who’s died in their area. Someone they knew. Putting faces to the numbers. On a platform that then shows who the dead were connected to.
10Facebook once sent a co-worker unsolicited “people you might know” suggestions for my adult daughters. He hadn’t even known their names, and I’m not on FB. But he’d just put my name on his phone’s contact list.
I’m pretty certain this idea would be child’s play.
If they’d do it. Maybe they have.
Nicole Wallace closes her show every day with a tribute to a single Covid victim. Very powerful stuff.
11What about partnering with Humans of New York? It is after all, there that the virus took hold in the beginning and Brandon does an amazing job of telling people’s stories. Volunteers could be trained to ask the right questions and get photos, others could edit and write each person’s stories and they could be archived, perhaps at the Library of Congress? Story Corps?
12We’re talking EM the F&SF author who’s very well known, highly accomplished, and has been around for a while?
13Would buy a button or a face poster. Great idea.
14It’s easy for people to claim COVID isn’t a serious health concern if they’re personally unaffected. Perhaps there’s a way to bring it closer to home, with the concept of six degrees of separation:
“Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people on average are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other.”
Rather than separation however, the idea would be six degrees of association. We are all within six connections of a person who died from COVID, or a person who tested positive.
As P.P. mentioned:
15Facebook once sent a co-worker unsolicited “people you might know” suggestions…
Good points raised about the AIDS quilt publicized in the ’80’s with the media available at that time. It’s a powerful picture when it’s all laid out on the National Mall – but there were only 3 networks back then with CNN being the upstart.
I think something like Decameron Row would be an overwhelming online tribute where StoryCorps, Newshour, BBC and NYT, etc. clips could be gathered into a visual with a map and zoom into virtual “neighborhoods” where the clips would be hosted.
https://www.decameronrow.com/main
Decameron Row was started at the beginning of the pandemic as a place where artists could give short commentary on the state of being during all this.
To make this expanded version personal, the yard signs Maryann suggests could contain tinyurls to the larger project with direct links to the local stories in the jurisdictions of the legislators ignoring the problem. Along with white flags – one for each person with their name on it – in front yards of the guilty.
The tools available in 2020 are legion. We are only constrained by our imagination.
And, @JJ, I’d be happy to look into any of the suggestions I’ve offered and any others that come around.
I LOVE Elizabeth Moon!
16Light shows. Light up the WH, tRump Tower, Merde-duh-Blowhole, every Republicon governor mansion and Congress varmints’ house with the names of those they’ve killed.
17Erase that confederate monstrosity in Georgia and engrave Covid victim names in its place. At the bottom engrave that it was due to Trump’s inability to make a good decision.
18What great ideas y’all have had! And places to look that I didn’t know anything about. Decameron Row is amazing. Thank you for giving the URL.
19Alex Goldstein, who used to work for DeVol Patrick, has created an account called @facesofCovid on Twitter where he collects images and stories of the victims of COVID-19.
Do you know what might be interesting is to take the pictures of all of the Covid victims and arrange for them to be projected on the front of the Hart Senate Office Building – like they project images on the front of Trump’s DC hotel. It will take awhile,
How about we arrange to have tiny wooden crosses with the names of the victims deposited in front of their offices?
20There’s a news show on MSNBC that ends at 6 PM.The gal who now heads that show uses the last quarter hour to honor the “cherished dead from COVID”. She can honor at most 3 people per show and this show runs 5 days a week. I really like the way she does it.
Can I also add to the list of victims in Elizabeth’s letter? How about farm workers, the homeless, and even the incarcerated.
21An interesting idea might be to take the idea of crosses, quilts, and more substantive compilations and combine them. Obviously, space is going to be an issue as the death toll increases. Maybe building a memorial with a video tribute to individual victims. It would run through 24/7 with maybe a minute or two tribute per victim.
If you wanted to make it bigger you could have multiple screens that each show a different victim’s story. I would think there is plenty of room on the mall to do this.
22