Read on Twitter
Over 1,000 COVID deaths per day!
Why so little outrage?
Well we all know Stalin's famous quote about one death being a tragedy and one million deaths being a statistic.
But how can we counter that and bring home the human cost of the pandemic (and the failures to deal with it)?
Why so little outrage?
Well we all know Stalin's famous quote about one death being a tragedy and one million deaths being a statistic.
But how can we counter that and bring home the human cost of the pandemic (and the failures to deal with it)?
The problem is that, while one person is a concrete reality, a whole individual with whom one can identify and for whom one can cry, a thousand or a million is an abstraction. How, then, (to draw on social representations theory) do we 'concretise' the larger phenomenon.
One powerful example we can all recall, is that of Aylan Kurdi, the little boy lying drowned on a Greek beach. No longer just a member of a pathologised migrant category, but a child seen through the eyes of a father. How could you see that and not weep?
The image turns the abstraction into the human consequence and wholly changes our relation to the event. Another example of this is the brilliant work of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum ( @AuschwitzMuseum ) who, each day, tweet the pictures and stories of those who were slaughtered.
They are thereby lifted out of the anonymity of the 6 million, their humanity is restored, as is our human response to their fate. I start each day looking at these pictures and reminding myself of why I study group processes.
And we can also learn from this to restore the humanity and the lives of those 1,000 a day lost to COVID. So can I make a simple suggestion: that each day, alongside the death statistic (which every newspaper covers) there is a picture and a story of a real person who has died.
That way we won't forget the enormity of what is happening. And we will be reminded, each one of us, of the need to do everything we can to deal with the pandemic.
