If empathy had a body it would be a bloated corpse in America today.

I just read an opinion piece in the New York Times called "Each White Flag: A Life Lost to Covid." This particular article focused on a participatory art project by Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg entitled "In America: Remember." The Times article goes on to explain that each white flag in Ms. Firstenberg's project represents a life lost to Covid in the United States. Visitors were invited to personalize and dedicate flags to honor loved ones who had died. What the Times did to make it more personal was they filmed these hundreds of people mourning. You can hear them crying, talking softly, and the wind flapping all the hundreds of thousands of the white paper flags. It was a beautiful thing to watch, very poignant, and I was moved by it even though I didn't walk through the project myself. So then I clicked on the hundreds of comments to see what people wrote about it. Here's what I found immediately (my comments/analysis are in italics:

From a person called Walker: "A high proportion of these people were elderly and would be dead anyway by now, covid or no. In the meantime many of them were forced to die alone due to draconian isolation rules. And many more died due to the loneliness and neglect caused by lockdowns and regulations that limited healthcare, increased addiction and mental illness, and caused financial losses. It's time a real analysis was done of the true impacts of this pandemic, direct and indirect. This type of simple count is next to meaningless."

Wow. Old people were just going to die anyway.

From Indy970: "The theory of evolution still holds: it's the survival of the fittest. While it is extremely sad to hear of these numbers, the reality is that it is very challenging to fight viruses and bacteria in an increasingly mobile world. Add to that the state of obesity in this country, no one should be surprised. The good news is that science and government intervention has protected over 99.7% of the US population. To put that into context, over 50 million people died globally during the 1918 pandemic with 675,000 in the US when the population was much smaller."

Hot take: no one should be surprised that fat people died in droves.

From C Clark: "The stupidity we are witnessing leaves me speechless."

I'm confused by this one: How can someone look at so much death and then call us all stupid for feeling something?

From David J:  "Yes, thank you for the article, and, of course thank you for the flag memorial. But I’m afraid it’s all for naught. America shrugged off the hundreds of thousands of lives, and are still squabbling over the wearing of masks. And one state has even made that horse medicine nonprescription. So much ignorance."

TL;DR: Americans are ignorant; I don't have time for this late News Flash. I'm actually surprised you had time to read the article and then comment. From someone who doesn't care, that's a lot of effort.

From RJ: "Why not flags for cancer deaths? Or traffic deaths? Or the deaths caused by domestic violence and suicide precipitated by misguided lockdowns? Asking for a friend..."

Wow. I actually don't care for anyone but myself. However, I need to virtue signal that all lives matter so I don't come across as a complete monster.

From Jim: "In the US, each year about 600,000 people die from cancer and about 700,000 people die from heart disease. That’s more than 2.5 million since covid started. The obsession with covid deaths is about things other than dying."

So...this guy is calling out mourners as having an agenda to shame other people? It takes a special kind of person to stand in a field of the dead and point fingers at grieving people and declare, "Don't you try to blame me for this!"

Anyway, I was unprepared for the vitriol of the comments that were made on The Times article regarding this art installation. A lot of America doesn't have any empathy anymore. I'd say about half if not a little over half. That's around 200 million people. How do we have a functional society when 200 million people don't give a shit about what happens to the other 200 million? Like...that's a serious question. To put it bluntly...if you were literally on fire, half of the people wouldn't help you put it out if it meant any inconvenience to them. You'd just burn.

We are in such a strange place in this country, and (more and more) I have an answer to the question I ask myself everyday: why is life so hard? It's hard for many of us, because (increasingly) you got to go it alone. There is nothing and no one to help you at all. If empathy had a body it would be a bloated corpse in America today.