Good evening, everyone. On this final day of 2020, after 12 months of human despair in the face of a global pandemic, we have collectively decided to lay death to rest because we can’t figure out any easy way of stopping it. Therefore, we gather today to say goodbye to “death” as a relevant concept in our society. We just don’t care enough to pay it any mind.
We used to think that COVID was just another case of the flu. Then people started dying: old, young, strong, weak, Asian, European, African, Latino. We lost parents, grandparents, and babies. Back then, we still feared death. Our first response:
“We’ve had enough, death. We’re gonna work together to protect everyone.”
We stopped society’s clock, a short time passed, and we grew restless.
And yet: death didn’t magically stop in its tracks. Death kept reaping, while our debts piled up. We had to change our minds.
“Actually, protecting everyone is hard and costs too much money.”
“You probably won’t die, if you’re young and healthy.”
“You don’t really need protection, it doesn’t always work.”
“Who cares about death anyway? People die from the flu all the time.”
We restarted the clock.
Guess what? Death kept coming, and it reaped what we sowed. We lost parents, grandparents, and babies. Day by day, death seemed less scary and more like a nuisance.
100,000 people killed: a grim milestone with much shaking of heads and a flood of obituaries.
200,000 people killed: a political talking point, and useful ammunition against the current administration. “How could our government fail us so badly?”
300,000 people killed: “Oh right, we’re still keeping track of that.”
Where were the faces? Where were the stories? Death finally understood the meaning of that old saying, “One death is a tragedy, but 100 deaths is a statistic.” We apologize to you, death, for turning you into yet another number to print in the paper.
Maybe a metaphor would help get the point across. Imagine you’re stuck in a room with 999 other people. Your friend Amy is on fire and screaming for help. People are chatting and saying: “Don’t worry Amy, it probably won’t hurt you. People burn all the time!”
The fire roars, Amy dies, death goes to sweep up what’s left of her. The survivors chatter: “Well, at least it wasn’t me. I hope she had a good run.” They politely look away from the fire spreading to Amy’s neighbors. 999 to go, death. See if we care.
In the old days, we gave death the celebrity treatment: elaborate funerals, burials, mourning, cursing fate, really anything to keep death on a pedestal and far away from the living. These days, we think of death as another body crammed into a refrigerator truck outside a hospital. “Keep it moving, we’re on a schedule here.” We demoted death to a custodian, and today we lay to rest death’s former awful reputation.
It’s nothing personal, death. We don’t have the attention span that we used to have. You're just the latest victim in the pandemic of apathy in today’s world. Maybe you can come up with more scary ways of killing people, with better special effects. Have you seen “Cabin in the Woods”?
— —
Where does our society go when we stop caring about the humans that death takes away? I thought that a death cult would embrace gleeful killing: genocide, public executions, martyrs. It turns out that a realistic death cult is one where the death of a human no longer means anything to us (positive or negative), because it’s inevitable.
When we try to bury death, we surrender our right to a “good” society. When we give up the good fight against death, we make life unbearable for the living. I do not know everything about what we owe to each other, but I know this: we have an obligation to fear for each other’s lives, to mourn and weep and fucking scream for every human taken before their time, and to rage, rage against the pandemic of apathy.
