fuckin' boomers, man. "bu buh buh buh Kennedy! And MLK! And, like, 'naaam, man! So what if I was ten you millennials think you have it so tough..." "you think this is bad you should have seen the Bataan death march!" Oh you mean like you did?It was bad, said Robert Allison at the Charleston, South Carolina, Post and Courier, but when it comes to worst, it's not even a contender. Take 1919, after World War I killed 20 million and devastated Europe, when the death toll of the Spanish flu epidemic reached 50 million. Or 1968, when MLK Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were gunned down, America's cities burned, a losing war in Vietnam divided the nation, and the Hong Kong flu killed a million. Then there's 1942, said Richard Chin at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "the year of the Bataan death march, the deadliest months of the Holocaust, and the beginning of the battle of Stalingrad." Or any year of the Civil War. Or consider 536, when a volcanic eruption in Iceland sent a dark cloud over Europe and Asia that caused "plunging temperatures, crop failures," and millions of starvation deaths. "In the long scheme of human suffering over the ages, we ain't seen nothing."
It's whataboutism taken to an extreme. The problem is that once you go down that road, only the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of man is actually bad. And even then, what about the dinosaurs? I mean yeah, covid isn't English sweating sickness. Perspective is a thing that's helpful insofar as it allows us to say, "this too shall pass," but it's entirely unhelpful as a means of coping in the moment.