I do this thing now where I look for the next place to insert here, to help us grasp & honor our losses, but the towns in the 87-88,000 range don& #39;t always ring a bell. Ogden, UT; Palm Coast, FL; Champaign, IL - pick one, imagine it. It& #39;s as if one of those towns now stands empty. https://twitter.com/emilylhauser/status/1259285615658622982">https://twitter.com/emilylhau...

I& #39;ve been to Ogden. I& #39;ve been hiking on Mt. Ogden, eaten a Mormon Muffin at The Greenery, & seen the dinosaurs across the street. It& #39;s as if every person I spoke to, everyone I passed on the trail, the family I& #39;d gone to visit, & every one of their friends were gone.

I have a beloved in Urbana, next to Champaign - together, they& #39;re the home of the University of Illinois. Urbana is where American Football made that 1st album. It& #39;s as if Urbana still stood, the house on the cover of that album still there & occupied - but Champaign were empty.

We& #39;re losing 1,400-1,500 people a day right now, the equivalent of my high school. All four years, all dead, every day. We& #39;ll have 100,000 dead by the start of the Memorial Day weekend.

In the fullness of time, schoolkids will learn about this, & they& #39;ll learn round numbers. They& #39;ll learn that XX thousand died here, XX thousand died there, and XXX thousand died overall. They won& #39;t think of names or remember faces. Mass cataclysm always becomes round numbers.

But we& #39;re here now. We do think of names and faces. We know that the numbers aren& #39;t round, and they did not have to be so large. That we were abandoned by our government and every single coffin is marked by their craven incompetence. The numbers aren& #39;t round. They& #39;re people.