How has this changed over time?

Your opening essay looked at our experiences of pleasure and joy, and related them to a typical US dining experience in The Olive Garden. Your second dealt with the emotions bound up with online culture. This essay will also ask you to examine contemporary culture in the US but from a very different angle. Gopnik has analyzed the struggles within the US over how to remember and commemorate those who have died in wars and domestic tragedies. Kleinfeld has looked closely at how the death of a single man in New York City set in motion a vast array of government and non-government agencies that are in stark contrast to the loneliness of the last years of his life. But both essays are just as much about how we choose to live, both as individuals and as a society, as they are about death. For your second essay, I’d like you to consider carefully both essays, and synthesize their ideas in order to answer the following prompt:
How can the way the US has treated, and currently treats, its dead provide insight into the values that influence and govern the rest of our lives? What does the way we treat the dead tell us about ourselves?
Follow up Questions
What are the strengths and weaknesses in the way our culture approaches death? You can view this from many angles: economic, political, moral, personal, public.
How has this changed over time? Are we doing a better job today than in previous generations? Worse? Why?
Try to find connections between the two essays. How are the struggles over memorials similar or different to the lonely death of George Bell? Why? What values animate those who care for the dead?
How would our society’s values need to change in order to treat the dead better? Or, if you think we treat the dead admirably, how might this change for the worse?
Suggestions
You will need to consider both papers. The best papers will connect ideas from both, then build on them to make your points.
Make sure you organize your paragraphs around your ideas about contemporary culture and find evidence for them. Avoid summarizing either Gopnik or Kleinfeld.