The response to the Covid pandemic by the US has been a disaster. The US was the country assumed to be in the best position to deal with a situation like Covid, after all the CDC wrote the book on how to deal with it (many countries used it, the US didn’t). Because of the failure in responding to the virus thousands died. But despite the more than 600,000 dead Americans this has not brought the country together (like for example 9/11 did). Washington DC has many memorials, making sure we as a country remember the deads of the past. Now a local artist set up a pop-up memorial to commemorate the 600,000+ on the National Mall, planting a small white flag for each dead American. And the outcome is breathtaking, because the memorial does an outstanding job in just presenting the scale of those that we lost. If you are in DC, I can only highly recommend going there an see for yourself since I don’t think those photos do the scale justice. You can find more details here: In America: Remember. One of the most powerful parts of the memorial is a tiny section (at the corner of 15th and Constiution) that shows the number of dead in New Zealand (25), and then how that would translate into dead Americans – and seeing the scale of those compared to our reality, behind those small numbers is mindboggling.
