For months now, I’ve been ingesting a plethora of antibiotics and sucking relentlessly on a nebulizer tube, all in an effort to slay an intractable lung infection. Instead of the meds, maybe I should have followed the current cultural norm and gone after this bacteria with a brutal and debilitating social media attack. After all, the most popular road to conflict these days seems to be paved with verbal viciousness.
(Please stay with me on this; a point is about to emerge.)
As Joe Biden would say, here’s the deal: A friend died recently. She was someone I worked closely with decades ago; someone I admired and respected; someone with whom I lost contact, except for occasional Facebook posts. A text message from a mutual friend said she died of COVID. Her obituary, however, was silent on the cause of death, noting only that the end came after a “hard-fought battle.”
The omission struck me as ironic. My friend had been a journalist. She never shied from a clear presentation of the facts. Between a quick perusal of my former colleague’s old Facebook posts, and a story in the current edition of The Atlantic, I figured out what was going on.
Her FB page captures the woman I remember from 30 years ago. Retirement clearly did not extinguish her passion; it merely opened up new avenues for it. According to her posts, she was thoroughly disgusted with both political parties, thought Emmanuel Macron should be removed as president of France, and urged friends to “read more books and be nice to each other.”
But here’s the kicker: There was also a small smattering of messages in support of the anti-vaccine movement. “Imagine,” one of them read, “getting four vaccine shots in one year and calling unvaccinated people crazy.” I hadn’t pegged her as an anti-vaxxer, but it wasn’t a total surprise. Her world view wasn’t designed for pigeonholes.
Then I read The Atlantic piece titled, “People Are Hiding That Their Unvaccinated Loved Ones Died of COVID.” It turns out there is a rabid army of anti-anti-vaxxers out there just champing at the bit to publicly curse the corpses of unvaccinated COVID victims.
These fully vaccinated guardians of morality delight in mocking the deaths of anti-vaxxers. Imagine being consumed with grief while preparing to bury a parent only to be bombarded with messages like this: “Glad your mom died. Too bad she wasn’t vaccinated.” To avoid such abuse, according to The Atlantic, many families of deceased unvaccinated COVID victims are omitting the cause of death in obituaries and other public announcements.
It gets worse. Hundreds of thousands of supposedly concerned and caring pro-vaxxers have taken to web sites to display screenshots of anti-vaccination posts from mostly ordinary folks who subsequently died of COVID (here, here and here). Their deaths are mocked, praised and championed. One site posthumously “honors” each death with an award named after Herman Cain, a former Republican presidential candidate who died of COVID shortly after appearing maskless at a Donald Trump campaign rally.
In less than two years, this pandemic has infected more than 72 million Americans, killed more than 870,000 of us, and shattered the lives of untold millions. We now add a new category to the box scores of devastation: Deaths Celebrated.
Call me naïve, but I didn’t see this coming. Sure, our public discourse has degenerated into an ugly verbal food fight. Where we once valued serious debate and dialogue over conflicting issues, we now rush to social media with vile insults and threats for those with whom we disagree. As disheartening as that development has been, however, going from a poisoned thumb tweet about someone whose beliefs you dislike, to dancing on their grave, is one enormous jump. I so wish we had not made it.
I did not crawl out of my convalescence for the purpose of defending anti-vaxxers. They are completely wrong on the facts. Their actions have hindered efforts to control the virus. That in no way, however, makes it right to mock their deaths and desecrate the grieving process of their bereaved families and friends. Death with dignity is woven deeply into our humanity. It is not contingent upon having the right beliefs.
For centuries, our culture has embraced elaborate norms aimed at respecting the dead and comforting their grieving loved ones. Seventeenth century English poet John Donne, in a far less gender-inclusive era, captured the sentiment well with his famous lines: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Even in war, there is respect for the dead. The military in most western countries have elaborate rules for the solemn and dignified care and handling of the bodies of enemy soldiers killed in action.
Remember the Westboro Baptist Church and its picketing of funerals? Leaders of the small independent congregation believed that the death of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan were God’s punishment for the country’s tolerance of gay people. As the caskets containing the bodies of dead soldiers were lowered into the ground, the Westboro crew carried signs denigrating the deceased. There was unanimous – bipartisan and universal – shock and repulsion over this grossly irreverent taboo.
Unfortunately, the Herman Cain Awards and their ilk were not met with the same reaction. They should have been. To celebrate anyone’s death, to inflict even more pain upon grieving families, rips at the very fabric of our humanity.
And that diminishes all of us.