History is an important tool for understanding what has been and therefore could be again. That is why the loss of RBG, who never stopped making sure we moved forward rather than backward, is so huge.
RBG was a real life superhero.
Rest In Peace.
What would she say about the fact that her casket was carried by 8 men?
I believe I saw 2 woman carrying with 6 men. I specifically looked for that.
I thought this was incredibly touching:
“It was carried slowly up the steps, between dozens of the justice’s former law clerks, and inside the court for a private ceremony.”
You can see the women in this photo: https://www.voanews.com/usa/breaking-another-barrier-ruth-bader-ginsburg-first-us-woman-lie-state
That was going into the Supreme Court (2 women). This morning, going into the Capitol, it was all men.
It looked like 8 men carrying her up the capitol steps, with a woman behind.
Does it matter the building? Women were represented and mightily carried her and climbed the steps in her final journey to her second home of many years.
As a practical matter, caskets can be quite heavy, and the bearers need to be roughly uniform in height. I was quite surprised at the weight when I was a casket bearer. Going up stairs increases the physical demands quite a bit, so you’d want some pretty strong people for that part.
With the pic that @abasket posted, you can see everyone is relatively young and fit, and the guys are not 120 pound nerds.
As an example, the caskets offered at https://www.costco.com/funeral-caskets.html are listed to weigh 200 pounds, so if there are 8 pallbearers, each one would be lifting and carrying 25 pounds plus 1/8 of the weight of the deceased. Of course, going up or down stairs would make the strength required different across the pallbearers.
This also touched me this morning. There is a short video of a black man paying respects at RBG’s casket. In the process he drops and does a few push ups. This is who the man was:
“The man who did pushups in front of RBG’s casket was her trainer.”
And at the Supreme Court, the 4 tallest guys were at front and back , the two women and two shorter guys were in the middle
( which I read being in the middle is less strenuous on the pallbearers). Today, at the Capitol, all 8 carrying the casket were men. I think it would have been nice to see a couple women in that group of 8 too.
Starts from 1:14:10 of the video at https://www.c-span.org/video/?476232-1/memorial-service-us-capitol-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg
His name is Bryant Johnson, and he wrote a book: https://rbgworkout.com/
@ucbalumnus - thank you for the link to the video - seeing him do that made me smile.