WASHINGTON (AP) –
With statements at dusk and a moment of national silence, President Joe Biden on Monday faced an unimaginable loss of the country (half a million Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic) as he tried to find a balance between mourning and hope. .
Addressing the public directly and publicly at the “heartbreaking and heartbreaking milestone,” Biden headed to a lectern in the White House Cross House, took off his mask, and uttered an emotional praise for more than 500,000 Americans he said he felt he knew.
“We often hear people described as normal Americans. There is no such thing, “he said Monday evening. “It simply came to our notice then. The people we lost were extraordinary. “
“So,” he added, “many of them breathed only the last.”
A president whose life has been marked by a family tragedy, Biden spoke in deeply personal terms, referring to his own losses as he tried to console the huge number of Americans whose pandemic has forever changed his life.
“It simply came to our notice then. I know what it’s like not to be there when it happens, ”said Biden, who has long treated pain more strongly than perhaps any other American public figure. “I know what it’s like when you’re there, holding hands, while they look you in the eye and walk away. That black hole in your chest, you feel that they suck it ”.
The president, who lost his first wife and daughter in a car crash and later an adult son due to brain cancer, fermented the pain with a message of hope.
“It simply came to our notice then. This nation will get to know the sunny days again. This nation will once again experience joy. And as we do, we will remember every person we lost, the lives they lived, the loved ones they left behind. ”
He said: “We must resist falling asleep for sorrow. We must resist seeing every life as a statistic or a blur or, in the news. We must do this to honor the dead. But, just as important, to take care of the living ”.
The president ordered federal property flags to be lowered to half the staff for five days and then led the moment of community mourning for those lost by a virus that often prevents people from gathering to remember their loved ones. Monday’s gloomy threshold of 500,000 dead was at stake against contradictory cross-currents: an encouraging drop in coronavirus cases and concerns about the spread of more contagious variants.
Biden’s management of the pandemic will surely define at least the first year of his presidency, and his response has highlighted the inherent tension between preparing the nation for the coming dark weeks, while offering optimism. time to eliminate vaccines. this could end the American tragedy.
After speaking, the president, along with First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff were left outside the White House for a moment of silence at dusk. The black school covered the door through which they walked. Five hundred bright lighted candles (each for 1,000 lost people) lit the stairs on either side as the Marina Band performed a misinterpretation of “Amazing Grace.”
The milestone comes just over a year after the first US-confirmed death from the coronavirus. Since then, the pandemic has swept across the world and the United States, underscoring the nation’s health care system, shaking its economy and rewriting the rules of everyday society.
In one of his many symbolic breaks with his predecessor, Biden has not shied away from offering memories for the lives lost by the virus. His first stop after arriving in Washington on the eve of its inauguration was to attend a twilight ceremony in the reflective pool of the Lincoln Memorial to mourn the dead.
That gloomy moment on the eve of Biden’s inauguration, typically a moment of celebration in which America marks the democratic tradition of a peaceful transfer of power, was a measure of the nation’s enormous loss.
The total death toll from COVID-19 in the United States had just surpassed 400,000 when Biden was sworn in. 100,000 more have died in the last month.
Former President Donald Trump invariably sought to minimize the total, initially claiming that the virus would go away on its own, and later limited itself to predicting that America would suffer far fewer than 100,000 deaths. Once the total eclipsed that mark, Trump shifted gears again and said the scale of losses was actually a success story because it could have been much worse.
Outside of the perfectionist tweets marking the milestones of 100,000 and 200,000 dead, Trump did not oversee any moments of national mourning or memorial service. At the Republican National Convention, he made no mention of suffering, leaving it to First Lady Melania Trump.
And at nationwide campaign rallies, he erroneously predicted that the nation “would be turning the virus around” while ignoring security measures, such as masks, and pushing governors to lift restrictions against public health councils. . In the audio tapes released last fall, it was revealed that Trump told reporter Bob Woodward in March that he “always wanted to cut it. I still like to reduce it because I don’t want to panic. “
Biden, on the other hand, has long relied on his own personal tragedy while consoling those who grieve. He has pledged to put himself at the level of the American public on the severity of the crisis and has repeatedly warned that the nation is going through a “very dark winter”, now challenged by the arrival of more contagious virus variants.
Biden has also deliberately set low expectations, especially in vaccinations and when the nation can return to normal, knowing it could gain a political victory by surpassing them. It is on track to far exceed the initial promise to deliver 100 million vaccines in its first 100 days, with some public health experts now urging it to set a much more ambitious goal. The administration says it hopes to have enough vaccine available to all Americans by the end of July.
Biden’s reference to next Christmas for a possible return to normalcy raised eyebrows across a pandemic-tired nation and seemed less optimistic than projections made by other people in his own administration, including Dr. Anthony Fauci , which suggested a summer return.
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Lemire reported from New York.