How did this many deaths become normal?

> We don’t honor deaths that we ascribe to individual failings, which could explain, Keller argues, why national moments of mourning have been scarce.

I always think of the argument of Eliphaz in the book of Job. It’s interesting that we have this built in belief that illness is connected to moral failings.

But it's not normal, it's a pandemic.

A simple google search would have shown the author that on average about 2.5 million americans die each year. So millions of americans dying is the norm. Not only that as the population continues to age, the number of deaths will only climb until we hit an inflection point. Besides, what does he want? Americans to be hysterically grieving for eternity? What's with the media and their neverending campaign to have us scared, depressed, angry and self-loathing. Shouldn't we be celebrating that covid wasn't as bad as predicted. I remember in the beginning, some people were predicting 5% or 10% death rate.

> America is accepting not only a threshold of death but also a gradient of death. Elderly people over the age of 75 are 140 times more likely to die than people in their 20s.

The author thinks we shouldn't be accepting of the fact that people in the last stage of their lives have a higher death rate than the people in the prime of their lives?

> It often occurs because of active distortion by politicians and the press, Lewandowsky told me. (For example, a poll that found that mask mandates are favored by 50 percent of Americans and opposed by just 28 percent was nonetheless framed in terms of waning support.)

I think the author has it backwards. The 50% support mask mandates is due to politicians and the press not the 28%. After all, 100% of americans were against mask mandates prior to the politicians and the press pushing mask mandates.

The media will say overpopulation is the cause of climate change and we should feel bad and we need less people. Then they'll say we should feel bad because a few hundred thousand more people died in the US than normal. No matter what, we should be scared, sad, angry, depressed, etc. Then they'll peddle pharmaceutical ads.

What is normal is that people aren't really able to grieve for millions they don't know. Whether it's a pandemic or war or genocide or famine or disease, out of sight out of mind. A lot of virtue signaling and political maneuvering but at the end of the day our in groups just aren't that big and we'll say "oh that's sad" and then move on with our lives.

There's 8 billion of us, millions are always going to be dying, and realistically nobody outside of their friend circles really care.

Why is the Atlantic finding it hard to believe that we are normalising pandemic deaths?

We have done just the same with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is still ongoing by the way. People would be surprised to know how many people die of AIDS in the World each year.

And future does not look so bright either. Would not be surprised if we soon have to deal with a third pandemic at the same time.