> The USA never suffered casualties of 1+mil ever.

Proportionately speaking, that estimate is on par with the amount of American deaths per total population during WW2 and something like 1/7 the American deaths per total population during the civil war.

> Proportionately speaking, that estimate is on par with the amount of American deaths per total population during WW2 and something like 1/7 the American deaths per total population during the civil war.

You think if they had the choice they would have rather sat at home watching netflix?

In the civil war people would totally picnic on the hill next to the big fight.

This is difficult point to make delicately, but there is a difference between a million young healthy men (or women) dying for their country, and a million people dying who are mostly at a much greater risk of dying from sickness compared to the general population.

2.8 Million people die in the US every year anyway.

Civil War comes close, ~ 600,000 - 850,000. And about 13 years of reconstruction.

A virus isn't comparable to people hijacking planes and flying them into buildings.

For one thing, it should be easy to prevent the latter whereas it's far from clear whether there's much we can do about the former.

> A virus isn't comparable to people hijacking planes and flying them into buildings.

Being dead is absolutely comparable with being dead though, no matter what lead there. It's the absence of a person that matters, to the people who miss them, not what people removed from that think about it in the abstract.

I lost my father through a completely stupid accident, made possible through carelessness on his behalf I think. If he had been murdered by someone, I would have felt a lot of hate, and that would have sucked and damaged me no doubt -- but the grief of missing someone is still the same, and I'd say the difference between murder and an accident are both tiny pebbles compared to a person being gone. Even if he had died to save 1000 million people, I would miss him exactly the same.

Denying that we can make worthwhile distinctions between different ways that people die is absolutely nonsensical.

If a serial killer murders your father, we're going to react differently than if your father dies of a heart attack.

> If a serial killer murders your father, we're going to react differently than if your father dies of a heart attack.

What matters, to me, is that I can no longer speak to a person. How that came about is very, very minor compared to that. Even knowing that we all will die some day does not change the simple, banal, them-shaped gap someone leaves. That gap is what remains, what created it does not. I'm just speaking for myself, but that I do.

How and why people die is no doubt very important when it comes to very removed people using tragedies, which was very much the case with 9/11. For them it's the other way around: the gap never really mattered and is soon utterly forgotten, while that evil deed none of us most forget remains as long as it's useful. I remember families of victims speaking out against war after 9/11, and mostly being ignored by a nation angry on their behalf. The dead were exploited more than honored, if you ask me.