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In this May 19, 2022, photo, a person visits a makeshift memorial near the site of a massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo the previous week. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
After several recent shootings in the United States killed and injured people who were shopping at the supermarket, going to church or just going about their lives, the nation marked the milestone of 1 million deaths from COVID-19. The number, once unthinkable, is now an irreversible reality in the country, as is the persistent reality of gun violence, which kills tens of thousands each year.
Americans have always tolerated high death rates among certain segments of society, but the numbers of deaths from preventable causes and the apparent acceptance by Americans that there is nothing in sight to change generates One question: Has mass death become normal among Americans?
“I think the evidence is unequivocal and quite clear. We tolerate an enormous amount of carnage, suffering, and death in America, because we have in the last two years. We have done it throughout our history” Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and professor at Yale who was a leading member of the AIDS activism group Act Up.
“If I thought the AIDS epidemic was bad, the American response to COVID-19 has been kind of…it’s a form of American grotesque, isn’t it?” Gonsalves. “Really? A million dead? And you talk to me about the need to get back to normal, when, for the most part, most of us have been living reasonable lives in the last six months?”.
Certain communities have always carried the burden of increased mortality. Deep racial and class inequities exist in America, and our tolerance of death is based on who is killed. at risk, he explained. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, professor of sociology and mortality scholar at the University of Minnesota.
“The deaths of some people matter more than those of others”, lamented ;. “I think that’s what we’re seeing in this really brutal way with this coincidence of moments.”
In Buffalo, the attacker was a racist determined to kill black people, according to authorities. The family of one of the 10 people he murdered —Ruth Whitfield, 86— channeled the pain and frustration of millions demanding action to change things.
“You expect us to do this over and over again. And again, to forgive and forget”, he affirmed. his son, former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield Jr. “While the people we elect and trust to fill positions in this country do their best not to protect us, to not consider us same”.
That feeling – that politicians are doing very little while the violence is repeated – it is shared by many Americans. It’s a sentiment epitomized by the condolences offered to victims of gun violence by politicians reluctant to change policy, according to Martha Lincoln, a professor of anthropology at the University San Francisco State.
“I dont think most Americans are comfortable with that. I think most would like to see real action from their leaders in the culture on these ubiquitous problems.” Lincoln, who saw a “political vacuum” similar in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With COVID-19, American society has even begun to accept the deaths of children from a preventable cause. Pediatrician Mark W. Kline wrote in a column for The Advocate newspaper that more than 1,500 children have died from COVID-19 and recalled the days of pediatrics “when children weren’t supposed to die.” he wrote. “At least not before the first pandemic of the social media era, COVID-19, changed everything.”
Gun violence is such a part of life in America now that we organize our lives around its inevitability. Sonali Rajan, a Columbia University professor who studies violence in schools. Children hold lockdown drills in schools. In half the states, Rajan says, teachers can carry weapons in case defense is necessary. She points out that some 100,000 people are shot annually and that 40,000 die.
She sees a similar dynamic in the current response to COVID-19. Americans, he says, “deserve to be able to travel to work without getting sick, or work somewhere without getting sick, or send their children to school without getting sick.”
It is important, he says, to ask what Policies are being introduced by elected officials who have the power to “look after the health and well-being of their constituents.”
“It’s amazing how ;no has that responsibility been abandoned. It is so as I would describe it” Rajan.
The level of concern about deaths often depends on the context, he explained. Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics at Barnard College. He points to the dramatic but rare events, like a plane crash, that seem to matter most to people.
Sethi points out that there are more gun suicides in the United States than there are homicides: about 24,000 gun suicides compared to 19,000 homicides. However, while there are policy proposals that could help within the limits of the constitutional right to own guns, he added, the firearms debate is ongoing. politically stalled, causing “paralysis”.
“We are divided by the fact that people believe there is nothing they can do,” Dr. Megan Ranney, of the Brown University School of Public Health.
Ranney highlights the false narratives spread by ill-intentioned people, such as those who deny that the deaths were preventable , or those that even insinuate that those who died deserved it. In the United States there is an emphasis on personal responsibility for one’s health, she says. “It is not that we are placing less value on an individual life, but that we are bumping into the limits of that approach,” he said.
In reality, he added, any individual death or disability affects the community.
Similar debates have occurred in the last century about laws child labor, labor protections and reproductive rights, while in the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis, there was a lack of political will to respond in an environment where discrimination against children was rampant. gays. Wrigley-Field notes that activists managed to mobilize a campaign that forced people to change the way they thought and forced He encouraged politicians to change the way they operated.
“I don’t think those things are out of the question now. It’s just that it’s not there. really clear if they are going to emerge” again, he stressed. “I don’t think giving up is a permanent state of affairs, but I think it’s where we are right now.”