How many songs have been silenced?

If John Prine were living he might write a song about it.

But the COVID killed him. He beat cancer twice, but when the COVID came around, it killed him.

It’s killing a lot of us. By Memorial Day – the day we set aside to honor our country’s fallen warriors – the pandemic will have claimed more than 100,000 American lives. Nearly two Vietnams in the space of six months.

And no sign of abating.

Nineteen years ago 3,000 Americans died in a single day and the nation stood still in recognition of a national tragedy. Last week when 3,000 Americans died in a single day some folks dismissed those deaths as less important than their “right” to get a haircut or their nails done. Their rhetoric parodied people taking precautions against spreading the corona virus as “living in fear” as if bellying up to a bar to order up a Busch Light was the equivalent of storming the beaches at Anzio – arrogantly indifferent to the fact that the veterans who actually stormed those beaches were among those they were putting at greatest risk.

There’s no denying we’re all getting restless. I’ve watched everything on Netflix and my hairstyle is becoming more Trumpian by the day. I want to suck down a draft craft beer, go to a ball game, watch a parade.

But then there’s my dad. He’s 94. Survived cancer. Survived a heart attack. Survived bringing up me, my brother and my sister. He’s gone through a lot of stuff and lived to tell about it … and, by golly, I’d just as soon he stay around to tell about it quite a bit longer. But if he catches the COVID odds that he keeps telling stories just aren’t that good.

And it’s not just my dad, and other old farts like him. There’s Mark, living with a donated kidney; Dave with a transplanted liver. I have friends battling cancer, holding out against heart disease, diabetes and a whole raft of chronic maladies that make them particularly vulnerable to the added stress a corona infection places on a person’s body. Heck, there are a whole bunch of us who are just plain fat and out of shape who easily find ourselves out of breath without the corona virus clogging our lungs. Some folks, it’s true, are more likely to die from the virus than others.

What’s really disheartening is finding out that that seems to be OK with some people. Folks claiming that measures taken to protect the public health are a tyrannical infringement on their “freedom” scoff at the growing death toll with an indifferent, “They were about ready to die anyway.” COVID was just the little push the old and vulnerable needed to cross over into immortality, and since they figure they’re strong and healthy -- Laissez les bon temps rouler! People dying? Just collateral damage on the way to herd immunity – can’t let Grandma get in the way of a trip to the casino.  

A few days ago President Trump called upon Americans to be “warriors” in the struggle to end the pandemic. What he left out in that call was the reminder that winning a war demands sacrifices of the deepest kind; that winning a war demands everyone pulling together to do whatever is needed to bring the enemy to its knees; that the first duty of a warrior is to defend the community – especially its most vulnerable members; and that a warrior abandon a comrade in the face of the enemy nor fail to honor those who have fallen.

Come Memorial Day, that’s something to think about.