The stories you hold on to will be colored by your own experience—but also by the experiences of those around you.
The things I am going to remember most about the pandemic aren't even the shared notable memories kleinb100 mentioned (Drink bleach George Floyd, Hunter's Laptop, "Will you shut up man," January 6) because honestly they weren't the most notable things I experienced. I'm going to remember the pandemic for the ways I was affected by it, which no one else can relate to, which really proves the point of the article. I'll remember watching my partner slowly dying for 3 months, refusing to acknowledge that his condition needed emergency medical attention, because he was scared of going to the hospital. Not scared of the care or attention he would get at a hospital, but scared because the hospital is where people with covid are, and he didnt want to catch covid. He undoubtedly would not have got as sick if he had been scared of catching covid at a hospital. Most of all I'll remember how the hardest part of my life was made worse by the restrictions of the pandemic. When my SO started vomiting blood and couldn't ignore any longer that something was wrong I wasn't allowed to go in the ambulance to the hospital with him. The ER let me come in for an hour, to bring his ID and contact his family but I remember them wheeling him to be admitted to the ICU and telling me I had to leave. I remember kissing his unconcious body goodbye with a mask still between my lips and his forehead, and not knowing what would happen. I remember calling my family hours away. I was all alone in a new city. I couldn't call the hospital for information bc SO and I aren't married and HIPPA laws wouldn't let them tell me anything. I couldn't go home to my family because we couldn't risk getting each other sick, so I sat for 3 weeks in the deepest, loneliness depression of my life. When SO woke up he was really confused. He lost a lot of blood and had been in a coma for a long time. He woke up during the peak of the BLM riots. What I will remember most about the riots, is SO telling me over the phone that they left the news on in his room, and he saw WWIII happening on the screen and he thought he had woken up at the end of the world. Everything since then has been just a minor inconvenience. I'll just remember this pandemic as having made SO's medical episode so much harder to experience, and for causing us to live with his parents for a year to escape the hot-spot we were living in. Everything over the last 9 months has flown by.
Unfortunately what I'll remember from the pandemic is my well paid govt's lousy response and the ignorance of a percentage of my countrymen. The was this played out was not a good look for the US. It highlighted all kinds of problems we've ignored as a country and still nothing is being done to address them
You won't remember the pandemic at all. There will be no prominent memories of this pandemic for the same reason there are no prominent memories of the Great Recession. There's nothing shareable. We all retreated into our private hells and passed the time - you only spend two days in prison, the day you go in, the day you come out. And while we all had individual anecdotes and little bits of "where were you when Kennedy was shot" Kennedy wasn't shot, our anecdotes are not unique nor noteworthy and they do nothing to reinforce our shared identity. Nobody remembers the Spanish Flu either and the historical representation of The Year Without a Summer is effectively unknown because things were just generally a bummer, people died and nothing important or noteworthy happened. There's a thousand words on English Sweat on Wikipedia primarily because it was a plot device in The Tudors. We know The Black Death because of some Dore woodcuts, Bocaccio's The Decameron (about people bored at an Inn passing the quarantine) and Monty Python. The stories we hold onto will be about the shit that happened in the midst of a pandemic: We're going to remember: - Drink bleach - George Floyd - Hunter's Laptop - "Will you shut up man" - January 6 Because those are the soundbites and flashes of stock footage every article from now until the end of time will pinch together to wave hands and say "pandemic". It's like how WWI has become doughboys in trenches and also a pandemic killed fifty million people. Fifty years from now nobody's gonna remember except when they look at crazy FRED graphs or ask their grandparents why everyone's wearing masks in the Black Lives Matter marches. Christmas 2020 was where an embarrassing cross-section of Twitter realized that the pharmacist in It's a Wonderful Life lost his son to "the influenza" and recognizing that holy shit there's a whole lotta depth to history that they just presumed didn't exist. You cannot assign meaning to a slow drip. Bankruptcies do not form lasting memories because they rarely turn out anecdotes other than "I was powerless". Those memories are just gonna get suppressed. I mean, I feel like I've been casting for a gajillion years. I've got excel macros and protocols and worksheets and opinions about wax and I've only been able to cast since February 2020. We've been calling 2020 the longest week in history because on the one hand, a lot happened (fuck you 'boomer '68 no longer fucking matters) but on the other hand, we experienced so little of it together so we're anchorless, rudderless and wondering why our pants don't fit anymore. And as we get out more we'll see people we haven't seen for a year, their hair will be grayer, their faces will be longer and we'll go "shit, Pandemic" and dump everything into a memory box that says Pandemic - do not open And that will be that. We share memories to bond. You can't bond over a "I had a shittier time watching Netflix and hoarding toilet paper than you did" so the social engine will find something else.According to Halbwachs, we begin composing our memories in anticipation of sharing them.
Each of us seems to dwell alone within a damp grotto of private thoughts. But we’re already engaged in the crowdsourcing project of organizing collective memories. Americans self-sort into countless communities, which have very different experiences of the pandemic.
Inherent in the architecture of a story is its meaning. Narrative-memory experts believe that by manipulating the plot of an anecdote, we may be able to exert a bit of control over a memory, even a painful one.
I mean it depends. One thing about 1918 is that most people who actually lived it are ... Dead. This means essentially that the stuff that lives on are things in the media reports. We have photos of guys in trenches and people in masks and anti mask leagues (which were formal clubs in 1918). On the other hand, judging from my family, the stuff we actually remember to pass down as oral history are things that affected us personally. My great grandmother caught the Spanish flu and lived. They boiled the silver wear (which probably didn't help because it's a virus, but what would a young Polish girl know). From the Depression I have stories of my great grandfather feeding random kids in Chicago and not charging some people for the milk he delivered. Also he had a blind horse. I think people who personally lost jobs and houses will remember. People who couldn't have their weddings the way they wanted will remember (my grandparents couldn't get some stuff because of WW2, so they made their wedding meal brunch after trading ration points), they'll remember if they participated in protests. I think 1/6 will join 9/11 and the JFK assassination as a "where were you when" thing. For the record, I was watching the speeches, Ted Cruz put me to sleep, and I woke up 20 minutes later hella confused. Stories that happened to you, you'll remember. Marquee moments that get press will be collective memories.
Read it and yeah it's been hard. I've been carrying to memories of people and places who either got covid, lost their family to covid or died due to neglect or other diseases. Even to this day, I keep on my mask in public, not just because of the memories but that the fight is not yet over: there's a variant and people in third world countries still have to wait some years until they get full vaccinations. It seems like this disease is going to be here for a while since countries are eager to return things "back to normal" despite that some people will not have a normal to go back to.
It basically got us to refocus on ourselves. canceled all kinds of social gatherings just to stop us for a short period of time and remind us that "self" is more important than anything else. I know it had many many bad aspects but I tend to look at the bright side. It got me to start my own website anyway. https://whatsgaming.net
Interesting. I can't help but think that the "Man in a Hole" and "Icarus" stories are not different than the other story forms; just shorter. Like the Cinderella story... Cinderella is essentially Icarus followed by Man In A Hole... Another thought: the way our mind stores memories is a let-down. It should do better than that! :-)
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/polti_situations/polti_situations.htm Our mind stores memories to help us socialize. Childbirth is magical, funerals are a time of bonding, we're all in this together, giving is better than getting. It's how we out-competed the Neandertals - they were objectively smarter than us but didn't form groups larger than a blood-bond family while Cro Magnons formed prosocial groups of 140-150 loosely-related individuals. The very structure of your brain has evolved to define you as a member of a group not a family so the group has primacy.I can't help but think that the "Man in a Hole" and "Icarus" stories are not different than the other story forms; just shorter.
Another thought: the way our mind stores memories is a let-down.
I don't know anybody who died from COVID and don't even know anybody who got dangerously sick. It's going to be an odd set of memories for me compared to a lot of other people. My key memory is probably going to be the company being told Thursday we're working from home starting Monday. But my group being told Friday we're still going to be in the office, and when I asked why when other key support staff was going home "for efficiency." Monday we were switched to rotating, and that's mostly tapered off to WFH. It's left me with a feeling of deep distrust of my management. One, because I don't know who was requiring we be in that Monday, two for requiring it and then changing their mind, and three because it wasn't my boss (who is a very weak leader), but he wouldn't say who or admit "efficiency" was a shitty reason.