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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't always ring a bell. Ogden, UT; Palm Coast, FL; Champaign, IL - pick one, imagine it. It's as if one of those towns now stands empty. https://twitter.com/emilylhauser/status/1259285615658622982
I've been to Ogden. I've been hiking on Mt. Ogden, eaten a Mormon Muffin at The Greenery, & seen the dinosaurs across the street. It's as if every person I spoke to, everyone I passed on the trail, the family I'd gone to visit, & every one of their friends were gone.
I have a beloved in Urbana, next to Champaign - together, they're the home of the University of Illinois. Urbana is where American Football made that 1st album. It's as if Urbana still stood, the house on the cover of that album still there & occupied - but Champaign were empty.
We'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'll have 100,000 dead by the start of the Memorial Day weekend.
In the fullness of time, schoolkids will learn about this, & they'll learn round numbers. They'll learn that XX thousand died here, XX thousand died there, and XXX thousand died overall. They won't think of names or remember faces. Mass cataclysm always becomes round numbers.
But we're here now. We do think of names and faces. We know that the numbers aren'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't round. They're people.
