What would collective acts of grief look like? Entire processions marching in black? Vigils for those that died of covid? Twitter bots listing their bios and faces for each victim.
We can write entire books on the victims of 9/11 but we have the equivalent of 1 9/11 in victims every month or so and we shrug our shoulders.
There was a shooting at the grad school I was attending that killed a few students. Within the day people in my cohort were asking if exams would get canceled. Not because they were bad people but because they had the expectation that the expectations of them wouldn’t change in the face of tragedy and they needed to plan their weeks accordingly. Really broke my brain for a second there and I remember being severely depressed thinking about how nightmarish and inhuman the society we’ve created is
I deal with a lot of professors and students worked through covid and would apologize for late submissions because family members died or they themselves were sick - the mindset to just be productive is just harmful.
we have the equivalent of 1 9/11 in victims every month or so and we shrug our shoulders
Not to make you more depressed but I'm pretty sure the lowest the 7 day average of deaths has been was like 260 and it's been more like 400 deaths per day minimum so it's more like a 9/11 every 6-11 days
I'd imagine it as a form of sick out where workers go on a soft strike until the conditions that caused these situations are resolved.
This will never happen in America, of course.
I haven't ever really agreed that mass-striking is out of the question in the US. It's not exactly challenging to convince people to just not go to work. Sure, many won't participate because they can't, or because they don't agree with it, but a whole fuckload of people - especially those who are glued to social media sites where the idea of a mass-strike could be propagated - would be all too glad to just collectively peace out of their job at the local Gamestop or whatever, for a few days or so.
That is, unless our immediate response to the idea continues to be "it'll never happen."
Fair enough. Part of my reasoning why we wouldn't see this kind of movement, though, is how easily americans accepted mass death from COVID. This is anecdotal, obviously, but my entire workplace and most of my social circle have believed that the pandemic is over since about June.
imo the best possible response to anyone mentioning a general strike should be "Hell yeah, let's do it." Even if we're not literally going to lay out the date and time in a Hexbear comment section, we should absolutely be encouraging the notion at every possible opportunity. The more we do, the more people will be willing to participate, until it actually starts to manifest.
I think this isn't a bad messaging plan on its face. Periods of memorial and grief are routinely used to galvenize the public on particular issues.
But it does have to lead somewhere or its just more spectacle. We've got enough Leftist Infighting without inventing new reasons to be outraged at one another for not Wearing the Leftist Poppy or queuing to cry over Lenin.
Days of Grief as labor actions and protest, though. That could be good.
I'm not going to shit on this person, I will say that mass death is nothing unusual from a historical perspective.
People view genocides and programmes like the Holocaust as aberrations, but historically and to this day there's always been groups of people getting completely fucked and massacred in some way or another.
Mourning the dead is necessary, obviously, but humans generally haven't directly grieved the loss of people who aren't close to them or otherwise impactful in their lives. Knowing about abstract suffering or avoidable death will certainly affect different people in different ways, but I don't think we evolved to be greatly affected by deaths in a remote tribe, which is effectively anyone outside of your social circle for all intents and purposes. We might inform future communal decision-making, governance, policy, resources toward learning from avoidable mass casualties. Maybe, even that low bar is hard to clear nowadays.
What would collective acts of grief look like?
I think you need to look at the mourning for the queen.
Vigils, minute silences, any large events that can be convinced to hold a silence or a moment of rememberance, etc etc. You could hold events specifically for the purpose of rememberance, target people that have been effected, target old people's homes, nursing and healthcare, millions and millions of people were directly affected and all of them could get something positive out of a moment that directly connects them with the millions of other people that were affected.
There is definitely collective solidarity building that can be done through this. I don't see it as idealism as some others are arguing here. People's emotions and connection to the wider collective is a real material thing, the isolation everyone feels is not idealist it is real factual isolation and anything that connects people in solidarity and a collective way pushes back against that isolation.
Sounds like the standard liberal idealist idea of just vaguely gesturing the collective will and vibe of the people without putting any kind of force behind it, therefore rendering it as a simple vent release for societal unrest and dissatisfaction, intentionally so or not.
The only real way I can think of off the top of my head to turn collective acts of grief into something productive, would be to funnel it into a general strike or at least any kind of strikes, people were in essence murdered by the state and the bourgeoise in order to keep the economy and profits flowing, its time to sabotage that system and get justice for all those we've lost etc.
Like "They dont want you to grieve the victims of covid or climate change", even if you did what would that change? Okay we're all grieving now but society is structured the same still and the state and politicians have no process for the voters to hold them accountable, so any and all promises offered from this collective grieving will be broken and torn away when convenient.
Sure, something material might be good for people. Personally I don't consider that "collective grief" and it doesn't sound like what's mentioned in the screenshot.
It definitely can be, I've certainly been to some funerals/wakes which weren't collective anything other than multiple people went to a place.
Helping people and using that opportunity to educate them about systemic problems is always good, it's a bit different from whatever the person in OP's screenshot is talking about, which is specific enough to where I wouldn't bother finding whatever else they wrote.
