WASHINGTON (AP) –
With remarks about the sunset and a national moment of silence, President Joe Biden on Monday confronted the country’s once unimaginable loss – half a million Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic – in front of the country while trying to strike a balance. strikes between mourning and hope.
Biden addressed the “grim, heartbreaking milestone” directly and in public, and walked to a White House Cross Hall speech tube, unhooked his face mask and gave a full speech of praise to more than 500,000 Americans he said he felt he knows.
“We often hear people being described as ordinary Americans. There is no such thing, “he said on Monday night. “There is nothing ordinary about them. The people we lost were extraordinary. ”
“Just like that,” he added, “so many of them took their last breath alone.”
A president whose own life has been marked by family tragedy, Biden spoke in deeply personal terms, referring to his own losses as he sought to comfort the large number of Americans whose lives were forever changed by the pandemic.
“I know all too well. “I know what it’s like not to be there when that happens,” Biden said. He addressed sadly for a long time more powerfully than any other American public figure. ‘I know what it’s like when you’re there and hold their hands while they look into your eyes and slip away. That black hole in your chest, you feel like you’m being sucked into it. ”
The president, who lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash and later an adult son to brain cancer, soured the grief with a message of hope.
“This nation will smile again. This nation will know sunny days again. This nation will know joy again. And as we do, we will remember every person we lost, the lives they lived, and the loved ones they left behind. ”
He said: ‘We must resist becoming sad. We must resist viewing every life as a statistic or a blur, or on the news. We must do this to honor the dead. But, just as important, to take care of the living. ”
The president dropped five days of flags on federal property to half the staff, leading to the moment of communal mourning for those lost by a virus that often prevents people from coming together to remember their loved ones. Monday’s gloomy threshold of 500,000 deaths plays out against contradictory cross-currents: an encouraging decrease in cases of coronavirus and concerns about the spread of more infectious variants.
Biden’s management of the pandemic will certainly determine at least the first year of his presidency, and his response has shown the inherent tension between preparing the country for dark weeks ahead, and also optimism about vaccine emissions. finally, this American tragedy can come to an end.
After speaking, the president stood outside the White House for a moment with First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff. Black bunting drapes the door they passed through. Five hundred candles lit brilliantly – each for 1,000 lost people – illuminated the stairs on either side of it as the Marine Band played a sad rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’.
The milestone comes just over a year after the first confirmed U.S. death from the coronavirus. The pandemic has since spread across the world and the US, highlighting the country’s healthcare system, cracking its economy and rewriting the rules of everyday society.
In one of his many symbolic interruptions with his predecessor, Biden did not hesitate to offer memories of the lives of the virus. His first stop after his arrival in Washington on the eve of his inauguration was to attend a twilight ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to mourn the dead.
The gloomy moment on the eve of Biden’s inauguration – usually a festive season in which America marks the democratic tradition of a peaceful transfer of power – was a measure of the great loss to the country.
The COVID-19 death toll in the United States had just exceeded 400,000 when Biden took the oath of office. An additional 100,000 have died in the past month.
Former President Donald Trump has always looked to reduce the total, initially claiming that the virus would go away on its own and later be locked in a prediction that America would suffer far fewer than 100,000 deaths. After the total darkened the point, Trump switched gears again, saying that the loss scale was actually a success story because it could have been much worse.
Apart from the two that mark the milestones of 100,000 and 200,000 deaths, Trump has not overseen a moment of national mourning and no memorial service. At the Republican National Convention, he made no mention of the suffering, leaving it to President Melania Trump.
And during campaign campaigns across the country, he wrongly predicted that the country would take a turn around the virus, while disregarding security measures such as masks and pushing governors to lift restrictions on public health advice. In audio tapes released last fall, it came to light that Trump told journalist Bob Woodward in March: ‘I always wanted to play it. I still like playing it because I do not want to panic. ”
Biden, on the other hand, has long drawn on his own personal tragedy while comforting those who are grieving. He undertook to compare the severity of the crisis with the American public and repeatedly warned that the country was going through a ‘very dark winter’, one that is now being challenged by the infection of more contagious virus variants.
Biden has also deliberately set expectations low – especially with regard to vaccinations and when the country can return to normal – knowing that he can achieve a political victory by exceeding it. He is on the verge of far exceeding his initial promise of delivering 100 million vaccinations in his first hundred days. Some public health experts are now urging him to set a much more ambitious goal. The administration says it expects enough vaccine to be available to every American by the end of July.
Biden’s reference to next Christmas for a possible return to normalcy has raised eyebrows in a country with a pandemic and seems less optimistic than projections made by others in his own government, including dr. Anthony Fauci, who suggested a summer return.
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Lemire reports from New York.