When you see all those articles and posts about India's covid surge, note how many have pictures and video.

And how the US, which had similarly overwhelmed cremator/mortuary services last year, had so few images of it.

The media is relishing the death of brown people.

Last year the US had bodies in uhaul trucks parked in streets, crematories running so continuously it affected air quality, etc.

How many videos of that do you recall?

But now that it's happening in India, every such post seemingly has to include videos of crematories, pictures of bodies, etc.

It is not accidental that covid was made abstract in the US, and horrifyingly concrete elsewhere.

In the US, you saw numbers. This many died, this many bodies waiting to be buried.

In coverage of India you see corpses, the dying, you see videos of the crematoria

In only a few months, your memory of the US catastrophic mishandling and half a million dead has faded. It was words on a screen. It was abstract numbers. Even the death of loved ones was at a distance.

Now, you are getting high-definition imagery of its destruction. Elsewhere.

By the end of the year, more people will have died of covid than in 2020.

And *their* deaths will be broadcast to the world, in full detail. The way american/uk deaths weren't.

And you will remember it as affecting them, the people in poorer nations, better.

By 2024 your memory of covid will be of poor nations, full of brown people, being devastated by a disease they were not allowed to get a vaccine for.

Not the wealthy, white nations who catastrophically killed hundreds of thousands of their own citizens.

By 2024 the memory of how the US failed in every single aspect of its response, will be a dry, academic, abstract thing of numbers and statistics.

Whereas there will be pulitzer-winning high-definition pictures of dying Africans, dead Indians, etc

You will know, intellectually, how much the US fucked up.

But you will have a visceral memory of seeing stacks of black and brown corpses in countries that were not allowed to be vaccinated.

And in 2031, covid will be remembered as a horrible disease that mostly affected devoloping nations. Those who let it rampaged in rich countries will be rehabilitated, consequence-free, cuomoing off how bad it could have been

"at least we weren't as bad as Mumbai/Lagos/etc"

The manufacturing of memory has already begun, it started when the US refused to show itself images of its own population being devastated, retreating to graphs and statistics to hide the horror.

A horror which, elsewhere, it's gleefully broadcasting