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.