For now, the memories are still fresh, but they will fade, as will the opportunity
IN a recent opinion piece in the Bulwark news network, a freelance writer named Daniel writes that while he grew up in Cleveland, although he now lives in Lakewood, and
Since I was a kid, Cleveland’s Public Square Park has always been the center point of the city… In one quadrant of the square is the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. It serves as a lasting memorial to those who died in the Civil War, a 125-foot monstrosity with statues of soldiers loading canons and firing pistols. The purpose of such memorials has always been quite clear: “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
The United States is about to bury the millionth person to die from COVID-19… Yet for the most part this milestone has been given not much more than a perfunctory note. Why is that?
Take the Civil War by comparison. About 620,000 of Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives in the Civil War during the four years it was fought in the 1860s. Of those deaths, 31,000 were Ohio citizens, and about 1,700 men from the Cleveland area perished. That is why that monument in our public square plaza exists: 1,700 was too many deaths to forget. In the roughly two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, one million Americans have died, 38,550 of those being in Ohio, and about 3,800 from Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland resides…
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