The Dead Have No Faces
It is a truth quickly learned with any serious interest in politics that we are all statistics. We are points on a graph, dots on a chart, numbers in a table, messy, twisted globs of data that can nonetheless be partitioned neatly into whatever a PowerPoint presentation wants to say. We are, in essence, meatsacks made out of numbers — but it is still jarring in this pandemic to have every level of the United States government treat us this way.
The flip side of a statistic is a name, a face, a birthday, likes, dislikes, and a network of human and emotional tethers that shape and influence life around us. This other, equally fundamental truth seems to have been deliberately ignored by policymakers from county seats to the federal executive through every phase of the COVID pandemic, because at every turn, the people in power have chosen to see us as numbers.
And so that is what we have become.
Already, we are over a million COVID deaths in this country (an undercount to be sure), and we are aggressively charting a path to more. We’ve abandoned even basic mitigation efforts, politicized and conceded on every basic element of pandemic containment, and tried to game the evidence of rapidly spreading disease by avoiding the collection or distribution of data that might require us to change.
It doesn’t matter much whether the government is run by a Democrat or a Republican except for whether their public posture on your impending death or disability is characterized by false sympathy or open defiance. Even as the bodies pile up and the healthcare systems burst with overflow, our leaders insist that our suffering is an inevitability we should accept as the cost of being alive.
It is necessary to do this, we are told, to support other, more important statistics: economic metrics. Our deaths are but a small sacrifice to prop up the American economy, which, gorged on the blood of earlier waves, cannot sate its appetite without extracting a human toll.
We have somehow developed a “representative” government that doesn’t care whether we live or die as long as the money keeps pumping. And no one is ashamed.
The shows must go on, they say. The offices must reopen. The schools must stay crowded with warm bodies and hot breath; the streets must flow with people. We have to clamber over each other, lean in close and mingle to keep the bars and restaurants open and busy. Caution is fear, and recklessness is freedom.
The American empire, c. 2022
And yet no one asks the questions we need to answer to actually make ourselves free. What is it for, the people dying intubated and alone? What is the purpose of leaving children orphaned and unsupported because their caretakers have passed on? Why have we built a society of death so that a few can have the wealth to live?
It is more than a month since I have caught COVID — fully vaccinated, boosted, young and able-bodied. In the two weeks I tested positive, my symptoms were mild but persistent: a sore throat, headaches, and a body-numbing level of fatigue. Now, in the aftermath, I have chest pain, sharp and persistent muscle aches, and an itch at the back of my throat that extends to the top of my lungs. To learn about what was happening in my post-COVID body, I had to seek out information from a foreign government.
I don’t know how permanent or damaging my condition is, but I know that if we multiply out the possibilities, there are millions more Americans who may never recover.
This is the choice our government has made: To sacrifice the many for the few, and call it progress. As cases soar and hospitalizations rise, as the “normalcy” we purchased on credit comes due with interest, it has never felt more true that “a million is a statistic.”
