Will The Stories Survive?

I'm hip, but only a hip boomer, so I don't know how to link to Twitter threads that I saw on an aggregator blog. If I did, I'd send you to a series of tweets by journalist and author Maryn McKenna. I do know how to copy and paste, so here's some of what she said about the dearth of literature (both fiction and non-fiction) about the 1918 flu pandemic:

The 1918 flu was so devastating that its society could not figure out how to verbalize it, and submerged it instead.
We are now in the worst epidemic since 1918.  With no historical model, how can we learn how to make sense of now?

My dad fought in World War II and all my long life with him, I only heard three or four humorous stories that had little or nothing to do with actual war. World War II has been extensively documented, but with few exceptions (Ken Burns, for instance) the personal experience is gone. So too in the case of the inaccurately-named Spanish Flu.

So will this happen again? Will the new world contain few hints of the tectonic shift that created it? Will it disappear in one or more important ways?

I don't think so. So much has changed since 1919, since 1945. Everyone writes – or “verbalizes,” in McKenna's words – about everything now (even, apparently, me). What I am more concerned about is: which story will be told? There's obviously the choice between the stories that will be told by the bitterly divided political factions in the US. But we'll also have the different stories told in each country around the world, stories that differ because of ideology, certainly, but also because of perspective, experience, level of coping skills, distance from the crisis, age, status, and etcetera. And then there are the stories told by the numbers, which have been inexact – apparently, not even close – since the beginning, and continue to be. The numbers will tell stories about the various motivations of those who assembled the numbers, but will not be able to tell stories (not accurate ones, anyway) about how many of us were struck down.

Will the true, personal stories survive?

Will a young frontline doctor or nurse who worked tirelessly through the crisis days in New York City or Wuhan or Moderna tell their children their story, twenty years later, or will they say, “There was this funny thing that happened in the break room...”