An uneasy comparison

It has been a week since the Johns Hopkins University tracker of Covid-19 deaths in the United States passed the 405,400 mark. That number is deemed to be significant because historians list the total US combat and non-combat deaths in World War II at 405,399. Since that number was passed, pundits and politicians have been using the number to emphasize how serious the pandemic really is. “More US citizens have died from Covid-19 than in all of World War II.” “This is a war with the casualties of war.” I’ve heard a lot of comparisons.

The number stood at 425,216 when I checked the tracker a few minutes before writing this journal entry. It is a tragic and shocking number and there are many indicators that it will go much higher before the virus’s deadly march through the population has ended. Another shocking statistic has been how the United States has suffered the highest death rate from the pandemic. It has remained fairly constant since mid summer that although the United States represents only 4% of the population of the world, it has suffered nearly 20% of the deaths. If you look at the map of covid deaths that appears on the Johns Hopkins website it is fairly easy to conclude that if you use the war analogy, this war, unlike World War II, is raging on our home turf.

The trauma of war is never limited to the fatalities. Nor is it limited to the grief of the immediate families of the casualties. The trauma of war extends to the comrades who survived but witnessed the violence, the doctors and nurses who treated the wounded, and the non-combatant witnesses as well. As I pastor, I’ve listened to too many death bed confessions and too many stories told by those who participated in World War II and lived for many years beyond the war to ever think that the casualties of war were only those who died before the end of the war was declared.

I suppose that there are some reasons why making the comparison between the pandemic and other historic events has some value. It is difficult for us to wrap our minds around the scale of the event that is occurring this year in our world. We don’t have the right words to speak of the tragedy. We look at the pictures of 400,000 flags on the national mall in Washington DC without being able to process them as individuals. It is the mass we see. It is just another big number in a world of big numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 12.6 people unemployed in the United States. The United States federal budget deficit was $984 billion in 2019. It is estimated that there are two million homeless people in our country. We are constantly confronted with huge numbers and find ourselves unable to process the information. As a result, we turn to analogies and comparisons to try to understand what is going on.

Comparing the casualties of the pandemic to the casualties of war, however, is problematic. Although both represent mass casualty events, for the victims and the survivors death is never a mass event. The pandemic has resulted in the deaths of over 2 million people, but their loved ones are not thinking in terms of millions. They are thinking in terms of Steven and Alan and John and Jenny and Harry and Denise and Mark and Beryl and Floyd and Paul and Muriel and Matt and Daniel and on and on. They are experiencing death as an individual experience.

If you sat on the battlefield of any war having witnessed the horror of the deaths of your friends and vowing to never forget them, any comparison that anyone makes will fall short and seem like a betrayal of your promise. “How dare you compare what is going on today to the tragedy of the war I experienced?” You can see how comparisons will always result in offending some people who have deep concern.

If you are currently mourning the deaths of multiple family members from the pandemic, there is no experience, in war or peace that compares with what is going on right now. This pandemic is unlike anything that the world has ever before experienced. Try as we might, every comparison will fall short.

If I were an advisor or political speech writer, which thankfully I am not, I would try to avoid all comparisons. I would seek to tel the truth about the depth of loss and the weight of grief through which we are navigating. I would try to find words of compassion and ways of making personal connections with those who are grieving. I would probably end up reaching for poetry and metaphor to express the tragedy that is too large for language, but I would avoid the use of simile. I would look for sentences that contained, “This is like . . .” and seek to replace them with other words. Simply put, there is nothing like what we are now experiencing. This pandemic is unique in all of history.

If you drive across central Washington you will see deep coulees and basalt cliffs and tortured landscape. Geologists say that the the end of the last ice age, between 12 and 15 thousand years ago a two thousand foot high ice dam gave way, draining Lake Missoula that covered much of Montana. More than ten times the flow of all of the rivers of the world rushed through and shaped the land. No humans witnessed the cataclysm. Geologists have drawn conclusions from the rocks and the shape of the land. Thousands of years later the scars remain to tell a story.

It is also true of human tragedy. The scars of this pandemic will remain long beyond the span of our lives. The stories they tell will be repeated - perhaps for as long as there are humans on this planet. It defies comparison. We would do well to be careful in our choice of words when speaking of the tragedy.

Made in RapidWeaver