I don't want to talk about it

 When the pandemic started, I took an interest, like so many others, in the Spanish flu epidemic. I'd heard of it, of course, but I was not all that familiar with its full extent, which was vast. Between 50 and 100 million people died around the world in less than two years. About 675,000 people died in the US alone. The population of the US at the time was just over 100 million, so roughly one in 150 Americans died of the flu. This means everyone knew someone, or more likely multiple people, who had died from it. My own great-grandfather died of it. This was a world-wide tragedy -- all of us, no matter where we are from, have connections to the Spanish flu among our ancestors.

And the U.S. had it relatively easy. In Tahiti, about two-thirds of the native population was killed. It was a massacre.

And yet, until the current pandemic, many people had not even heard of the Spanish flu. Why did we not talk about it more? We've all learned about World War I, yet the Spanish flu, which was far more devastating than the war in the U.S., is only briefly covered in most history books.

Based on my (admittedly spotty) research, I've come to think that the historical importance of the Spanish flu was kept to a minimum because the people who went through it didn't want to talk about it. It was a miserable time for everyone, there was civil unrest, enormous dissension -- sound familiar? And death, death everywhere. 

I also suspect that people were not necessarily proud of how they behaved during the pandemic. A contagious disease is a unique kind of disaster. Most natural catastrophes tend to bring people together. We all have a tendency to help each other in a time when everyone is having a tough time. That's what makes this type of pandemic so cruel: we cannot hug each other; crying on one another's shoulder could be deadly, so we are forced to retreat into ourselves. We do have a huge advantage over our ancestors: we can at least communicate easily. Imagine going through Covid in 1990, when all we had was the telephone. Now take away the telephone, and you've got 1918-1919 for most people. But regardless, are we in fact doing everything we can to take care of the most vulnerable members of our society? The question answers itself, doesn't it? The Spanish flu affected mostly young people, but this time, it's the oldest and feeblest among us who are hit the hardest. Will we look back upon this time and tell ourselves that we did the right thing?

Assuming the current Covid crisis is more or less resolved by the end of 2021, will it mostly vanish from our collective memory? I hope not. It's far from over, but at least we can begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As far as we can tell at this point, when it's over, it will probably be not as bad as the Spanish flu. But it'll be plenty bad.

Above all, I think I will remember the astonishing politicization of this calamity. If you'd told me ten years ago that we, as a nation, would disagree on straightforward matters of public health, purely based on party affiliation, I would have laughed it off as absurd. But here we are. As we now enter a tough winter, with many, many more deaths ahead of us, I project myself into the future, look back at today, and shake my head in disbelief. This crisis has unveiled an astonishing amount of nonsense, and I see little evidence that we're going to learn from it.