Commemoration of September 11 in the Corona crisis: when death is no longer shocking

The first appeared the next day. Soon the notes were posted everywhere, on walls, flashlights, newsstands, bus stops, phone booths: search posters with photos, physiological characteristics (“brown eyes, blood group A”) and the last whereabouts (“Tower One, 86th floor “) of the disappeared, who had never returned home. Roll calls were like silent screams.

“Who saw it?” “Please report.” “Missing.”

The next day: September 12, 2001, 19 years ago. New York City was still in shock from the 9/11 attacks. But the work of trauma and mourning had already begun, with those search announcements that fused hope and horror and combined private pain with collective pain. For months they shaped the image of the city and its soul.

Many posters now hang as relics in the September 11 Museum. Outside the building, in what was once Ground Zero, New York commemorated the 2,977 deaths from those tragic hours on Friday, as on every anniversary.

But a new tragedy hung over the ceremony. A new serious crisis that now forces a radical rethinking, but which is only revealed indirectly, in the protective masks worn by those present. Almost 200,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 so far. The pandemic hit the United States much harder than September 11, and New York City suffered more again, with an estimated 24,000 deaths. Eight times more than September 11.

“This city showed the whole world the strength, the importance of New York City,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio this week about 2001, and drew parallels with the crown crisis: “Once again, people are watching this city with great amazement. “

“Everyone in New York knew someone who died on September 11,” Louise Mirrer, president of the New York Historical Society, told the New York Times. “Everyone in New York knows someone who died from Covid-19.”

So why is everything so different today? Why is it so difficult for Americans in particular to mourn the victims of the crown as collectively as the victims of 2001? Their names made many eyes cry again on Friday. The victims of the pandemic, on the other hand, are statistics that are usually only recorded with a shrug of the shoulders.

Garrett Graff writes in “Atlantic” magazine that America is not capable of common strength and common pain today. The author of “And Suddenly This Silence”, an oral history of September 11, recalls that shared suffering used to be a “civic religion” that welded the country, from the revolution to the civil war and the world wars. those 102 minutes of terrorism in 2001.

September 11 was an excellent example of this national tradition and, at the same time, the moment that finally disenchanted him as an illusion.

Some images, feelings and sensations from 2001 are still valid today. The smell of corpses. Panic and helplessness. The stretchers on the sidewalks in front of hospitals waiting in vain for survivors.

Patriotic rituals followed: hymns, speeches, the “New York Times” mini-obituaries. But that was just a facade behind which something grim was hiding.

America’s “War on Terrorism” killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria. The CIA tortured and killed. Soldiers and mercenaries committed war crimes. In the United States, Muslims, and anyone who looked like it, were defamed and harassed.

One of the most fervent involved in this hunt was Donald Trump. In 2015 he lied in the presidential election campaign saying that he had seen “thousands” of Muslims cheering for the collapse of the World Trade Center. And even this week, he called his predecessor “Barack” when he performed in Michigan. Hussein Obama “, where he dramatically dragged” Hussein “, to the boos of his supporters.

Hatred erased any shared pain. In addition, there were more and more tragedies, one by one: natural disasters, shootings, racism, police violence. By the time Corona sneaked in, the nation had long been numb.

Especially since a virus is much more invisible than the visual horror of September 11. When New York became the crown’s global hotspot, only the refrigerated trucks in front of the hospitals gave a glimpse of what was really going on. Rather than collective, the suffering is now private and terribly lonely: Victims die painfully in quarantine, behind Plexiglass and away from camera lenses.

In May, the “New York Times” filled four pages of newspapers with the names of the first 100,000 corona deaths in the United States: “An immeasurable loss.” Since then, the number has doubled and the loss has become routine.

By nature, mass extinctions are always difficult to pin down. But America’s crown crisis, hard to understand, is mostly self-inflicted.

Because millions here consider the pandemic to be fake news. This is thanks to Trump: He deliberately downplayed the crown risk from the start, confessing to Watergate developer Bob Woodward: “I always wanted to downplay it. Still I hold it back.”

It is difficult to estimate how many of the nearly 200,000 dead in the US could be alive today if Trump had not deliberately lied.

Even before Corona, the United States had split into two camps, which are now more intransigent. The collective uprising now only trembles on the Black Lives Matter protests on the one hand and the recently revived Trump-worshiping masses on the other.