February 22 2021 The Pandemic Consumes America: On the Wisdom of Our Darkness and the Brokenness of the World

In a magisterial address to the nation and a ceremony of shared grieving and trauma, President Biden spoke to us all today of the fragile nature of our lives and the necessity of our humanity in helping each other survive and heal from existential threats.

For on this day we passed half a million deaths from the Pandemic, many times more than any other nation on earth while commanding more of its resources than any.

Why is our death toll so high compared with the rest of the world?

Because Trump, and his collaborators, enablers, and co-conspirators which includes the Republican Party, intentionally sabotaged our nation’s response and weaponized the Pandemic as an instrument of racist genocide and the Quarantine as an instrument of repression of dissent against the Black Lives Matter protests.

All of us who have lost a family member or loved one to the Pandemic are victims of the Republican campaign of fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror, targets or collateral damage of genocidal ethnic cleansing and authoritarian marginalization, silencing, and erasure of nonwhite champions of racial justice, equality, and our universal human rights.

For this there must be a reckoning, but first we must survive and heal together, as a united America and humankind.

As written by Daniel Strauss in The Guardian; “In a somber address to the nation as the US surpassed half a million coronavirus deaths on Monday, Joe Biden urged the country to unify in its battle against the virus.

“I ask all Americans to remember those we lost and those we left behind. But as we all remember, I also ask us to act, to remain vigilant, to stay socially distanced, to mask up, get vaccinated when it’s your turn,” the president said in his address from the White House.

“We must end the politics of misinformation that’s divided families, communities and the country; that’s cost too many lives already,” Biden continued in his speech. “It’s not Democrats or Republicans who are dying from the virus. It’s our fellow Americans, it’s our neighbors. It’s our friends, our mothers, our fathers, our daughters, husbands, wives. We have to fight this together as one people, as the United States of America. That’s the only way we’re going to beat this virus, I promise you.

As a nation, we can’t accept such a cruel fate. While we’ve been fighting this pandemic for so long, we have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow,” Biden said.

“Let this not be a story of how far we fell, but how far we climbed back up. We can do this,” Biden said.

“This nation will smile again. This nation will know sunny days again. This nation will know joy again and as we do we’ll remember each person we’ve lost, the lives they’ve lived, the loved ones they’ve left behind. We will get through this, I promise you.”

Biden’s speech was bookended by solemn rituals to honor the 500,000 deaths.”

As reported by the BBC; “The US has topped over 500,000 deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic.

It will be the latest grim milestone for a country that has by far the highest death toll in the world from the virus.

The US has seen more than twice as many deaths as the next hardest-hit country, Brazil.

The first known US death from the virus came on 6 February 2020.

That means half a million lives have been lost in just over one year, more than the US death tolls from World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined.

To put that into perspective…

If every death came from the city of Atlanta, nearly its entire population would be wiped out.

If you held a minute’s silence consecutively for every person who has died from Covid in the US, it would take 347 days, almost a full year, to honour them all.”

But this is death toll does not represent the mass scale of our shared national trauma and grieving; a bereavement multiplier study has found that nearly nine people are left grieving for each of these deaths, or four and a half million Americans.

As so often, it was an observation by a friend which redirected my attention to what is important, in this case the need for shared rituals of grief; “We need mourning rituals for the dead and dying of this pandemic. Part of the soul fatigue is a failure to process grief.”

As I wrote in the wake of my mother’s death from cancer, over a year ago now, On the Wisdom of Our Darkness and the Brokenness of the World; Grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; the realm of our darkest and most negative passions immerses us in atavistic states with totalizing and tidal force.

Life disruptive events can destabilize identity and realign personality, transform meanings and values, send shockwaves through our network of relationships, shift our worldview and unmoor us from the anchorages of our ideological paradigms and historical contexts.

Such traumas confront us with the unfiltered face of our shadow self as a healing process, a transformative journey filled with dangers but also with the limitless possibilities of rebirth. As redirections of our momentum disruptive events force reflection and redefinition of ourselves as intentional choice; among them the death of a loved one is surely the most terrible.

Overwhelming and painful as they may be, our negative emotions have adaptive value or we wouldn’t have developed them. How then do they help us survive? What is their purpose?

Grief, especially but not exclusively, connects us with other people, opens us to the pain of others, and brings us to a renegotiation of the terms of ourselves and our lives.

We are bound together by the flaws of our humanity, by our brokenness and our pain, by the fragile nature of our lives and our vulnerability to disruptive events.

The negative emotions are a biosocial tax on individuals which in part serve to drive us together to meet threats collectively as societies united in the cause of our survival, wherein the costs are shared among distributed resources. This is the origin of altruism; humans are designed to help each other. Each of us is marked by our nature as our brother’s keeper.

Far from wholly destructive, our darkness can be growth oriented and creative; destruction may be read as liberation and as the adaptive potential of a system.

Our darkness whispers, embrace your passion and your true self, yourself in others and others in yourself as interdependent aspects of a holistic system and oceanic consciousness, and be reborn.

Passions of both light and darkness can act as warning buoys as we navigate into the future and the unknown; they can also illuminate and provoke us to abandon the known and discover new possibilities. Joy and sorrow, as with all our myriad passions, come as balanced pairs which help us process events by leveraging change.

Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.

To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?