Inaugural Weeping, Inaugural Joy
It happened the moment those four hundred lamps, representing the 400,000 American lives lost to the COVID-19 virus, illuminated the reflecting pool between the Washington monument and the Lincoln Memorial. I exhaled. I wept. I dropped my shoulders. I closed my eyes. I felt as though I had been received in a comforting hug, or been offered the gentle hand of a loving and supportive friend. Into my head popped a verse from Tehillim (Psalms): “One may lie down weeping at nightfall; but at dawn, joy” (30:6).
Don’t get me wrong: The Biden Administration’s National COVID Memorial did not solve anything. Not infection rates, not the ableism that treats people as disposable, not the refusal to wear masks, not systemic discrimination.
But what the memorial did for me, and I hope, our nation here in the U.S., was to ritualize our trauma, create a container for unexpressed grief, and frame this virus not as a series of individual misfortunes, but as a collective experience that requires a collective response.
Sometimes, we move too quickly to joy, to celebration, to relief. We move in that direction because we desperately need to be able to hope in a future that will erase the oppression and the despair and the suffering of the past.
The thing is, those of us who have been overlooked and oppressed, those of us who have…
