History suggests we may forget the pandemic sooner than we think
Crucially, a pandemic lacks the essential ingredients of a story: clear heroes and villains with intent and motive. The Covid enemy is, despite our best efforts to anthropomorphise it, an invisible and faceless virus. That matters because commemoration is necessarily a moral exercise. Think of the way we marked Holocaust Memorial Day this week, lighting candles and telling the stories of those who survived or resisted the Nazi menace. We cast the past as a moral test, judging who passed and who failed. Wars can be remembered proudly by those who won, and even by those who lost: witness the Confederate statues put up in the early 20th century to honour what white racist southerners believed was a noble cause.