It’s not grief we are lacking, but rather outrage. 250,000 covid deaths are 100 times the number of people that died in the twin towers on 9/11, yet there is no collective outrage. That is because we are not witness to the suffering in real time. HIPPA laws prohibit us from personalizing the tragedy. So all we see are grieving relatives, testimonials from recovered patients, and numbers.

A turning point in the Viet Nam war was when Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather before him, showed us first hand what we were subjecting our young men to. They changed the image in our mind from numbers to actual bleeding, dying young men. People can’t get emotional about numbers. We need to see the suffering. The gasping for air. No one wants to see that, but we need to.