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juanchoandmielnewsdesk · 4 years

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FROM THE TRENCHES - A HORROR STORY - SORRY

POSTED ON FACEBOOK BY DR BRANDON BIKOWSKI OF SCOTTSDALE ARIZONA ON JUNE 27: This week I was one of the COVID doctors in the hospital. Before I went on service, I had planned to share my experiences when I got home after my last shift. That didn't happen because I was mentally and emotionally exhausted after being at the hospital for 15+ hours. I am going to try to break things down so that the general public can understand, because I want everyone, not just my fellow healthcare workers, to be as scared as I am. This is going to be long, but hopefully will be worth the read for someone. For references purposes, I am a Hospitalist, which is sort of like your primary care doctor when you're in the hospital. We manage your chronic medical conditions and most of your acute issues in the hospital and consult specialists when we need additional help with complex decision making or a specialized procedure to be performed. We are also the primary point of contact for your nurse on most issues. I live in Arizona, the current COVID-19 hot spot. Arizona never really closed. Any level of closure that we obtained was the result of petitions with thousands of signatures from physicians. Despite pretty much being able to do anything you wanted to do except get your hair/nails done or eat out at a restaurant (carry out stayed open), people protested the state being closed. The state reopened immediately when criteria were put out to guide how and when states should reopen. To be clear, Arizona did not meet a single criteria for reopening. In addition, masks were not mandated. Governor Ducey avoided mandating masks and made it the responsibility of city Mayors to make any mandates. Mandatory masks were just implemented a few days ago. As you have almost certainly seen in the news, the rapid reopening without mandated masks has been catastrophic. In a couple of weeks we have gone from a few hundred cases per day to around 3,500 cases per day. A few weeks ago, I was working at the COVID-free hospital designated to be the primary elective surgery campus within the network. The past few days, our recently reopened COVID Unit has been near or completely full. I shared the patient's on the unit with one other hospitalist. Before I went on service this week, I read anything and everything I could to prepare myself to be the COVID doc. I was up to date on all of the latest recommendations. I was a little nervous, but felt like I was armed with the information that would allow me to help my patients. I quickly learned that there is no possible way to prepare for how to treat a COVID patient. There is no rhyme, reason, or pattern. There is no possible way to predict what will happen with your patient. In my sign out to the doc taking over for me today, I prefaced the individual patient sign outs with, "one slightly improving, one with less oxygen requirements but possible new liver failure developing, everyone else getting worse." I have never seen anything like this. None of us have. We have no idea what we are doing. We are sharing evidence from small studies that could help and utilizing treatments that we think and hope are helpful. Of course, we also thought hydroxychloroquine was helpful a couple of months ago. So, we're hopefully helping people, maybe hurting them, and trying our best. We are flipping people on their stomachs while wide awake on a machine pushing oxygen into their lungs to try and help; this is called the prone position, and it works, but you're stuck in that position for as long as we can keep you there. The longer the better. Anyone on supplemental oxygen is receiving dexamethasone based on the European study that came out last week. We were using Remdesivir, but a patient I admitted two days ago is the last one that will receive it from our current stockpile. Convalescent plasma from patients that had COVID, recovered, and donated plasma is being administered, but studies suggest that antibody concentration diminishes by up to 90% within 2-3 months, so who knows if that's even doing anything. I realized in the past two days that oxygen saturation numbers that you see on the machines are completely worthless in many COVID patients. So, the one thing we thought we knew, that COVID causes profound hypoxia, was true, but it's actually much worse than we thought. In order to figure out if you are hypoxic (low blood oxygen levels), a needle is stuck into an artery in your wrist as often as is needed. It hurts. A lot. I will have a needle stuck into your artery as often as I need to. I'm sorry, I know it hurts, but it's for your own good. In any other time, most of my patients would already be intubated on a ventilator. We are managing so many critically ill patients on regular hospital floors. If we sent everyone to the ICU that would normally be there based on their current status and put them all on ventilators, all resources would be depleted in a day. The patients I cared for the past few days were the most miserable, uncomfortable, terrified patients I have seen in the past four years. I sat with them while they cried because they are scared that they will get worse and get intubated and die without ever seeing their loved ones again. I can't comfort them by saying they'll get better soon, because I don't know that they will. All I can tell them is that we're doing everything we can and I really hope they improve. I held a patients hand while she cried and screamed, "oh my god, I'm going to die, aren't I? I'm dying" when I told her we couldn't give her more oxygen without intubating her and putting her on life support. I then tried to comfort her children over the phone after I informed them they were not allowed to come in to the hospital to be with her. They asked if someone could be there to comfort her if she is going to die. Many of my patients were young. Many have no underlying conditions that predispose them to a bad outcome, yet are one bad blood oxygen reading away from needing to be intubated. COVID does not care who you are. I am scared and you should be, too. All of that is to send the following message: Please, please, stay home if you can. If you need to go out, WEAR A MASK! Do not touch your face. Wash your hands and sanitize often. I can't promise you won't end up in the hospital with COVID even if you do all of these things, but I promise it's the best shot you've got. P.S. THANK YOU to all the amazing RNs, RTs, PCTs, Pharmacists, Pharmacy techs, lab techs, physical, occupational & speech therapists, social workers, case managers, environmental service workers, and everyone else that makes it possible to care for these patients in the best way we know how. You don't get enough credit. You all are the real MVPs. ______________________________________ ADDENDUM: To be clear, COVID-19 is caused by a virus. This is a PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS. It is not, never has been, and never will be a political issue. Politics have played a huge role in getting us into this mess, and it's time to cut them out. COVID doesn't discriminate, and it definitely doesn't care who you're going to vote for. When you see/hear/read anything related to COVID-19, pay attention to who is posting the information. If it is not coming from a medical professional, question your source. ______________________________________ ADDENDUM-2: I am so incredibly shocked at how widely this has been shared. Thank you all! Please continue to share! Since people are reading this, I would like to use this platform to ask you to PLEASE talk with your loved ones about your wishes. If you have an advance directive, please bring it with you if you are unfortunately in need of hospitalization. If you do not have an advance directive, it's time to get one. If we do not know what you would like to be done, we assume that the answer is everything. If your loved one or listed MPOA is unaware of your wishes, they will likely also err on the side of doing everything. Help them to make those very difficult decisions by making your wishes known. Do not wait until you are in the hospital, because it may be too late. Please look up what it means to be "full code" vs "DNR/DNI." Know what you would want done to you.

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floridaprelaw-blog · 4 years

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The Summer of Love… And Violence: The Aftermath Of CHOP

By Henry Jacobson, Florida State University Class of 2020

July 30, 2020

Seattle’s CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized Protest) zone arose from the BLM protests that erupted after the unjustified murder of George Floyd.Protestors in Seattle, Washingtondesignated six blocks of the city as a police-free zone. Referred to as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) or CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest), the area was claimed by the protestors when the local police precinct was evacuated by the police in efforts to not escalate tensions. The zone lasted without police interference for 24 days, from June 8th to July 1st. In that time political parties debated, and people formed their opinions about CHOP. The mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, said in an interview that the whole event might be deemed a “summer of love” [1]. By July 1st, when police re-entered the zone, there had been four shootings resulting in two dead and more injured.

Two fatal shootings occurred in CHOP. The first happened in the early morning hours of June 20th. 19-year-old Lorenzo Anderson was shot multiple times and died later at the hospital. A 33-year-old man was also shot and arrived at the hospital in critical condition [2]. The men were not picked up and driven by an ambulance and experienced EMTs because of the zone being blocked off and the removal of the police. Instead, the men were carried to the nearest hospital by medical volunteers within the zone. The second shooting involved more teenagers, “a 16-year-old boy was killed and a 14-year-old boy was wounded early Monday morning when they were shot at 12th Avenue and East Pike Street in the protest area known as CHOP, in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood” [3]. One of the teenagers was brought by a private vehicle to the hospital, the other arrived 15 minutes later in an ambulance. The crime scenes of both were ruled as being tampered with by the investigators that arrived later. The Zone’s lack of police presence and barricades made it impossible for public agents to arrive in a timely fashion. No arrests have been made pertaining to both fatal shootings. Both deceased victims were teenage black men. These acts of violence within the CHOP zone spurred the police to reenter the zone on July 1st. Regarding the murders, Chief of Police, Carmen Best had this to say: “Enough is enough.Two African American men are dead, at a place where they claim to be working for Black Lives Matter. But they’re gone, they’re dead now”[3].

Seattle’s government eventually responded to the killings by issuing executive orders to leave the area. “More than three dozen people were arrested during the early-morning ouster, charged with failure to disperse, obstruction, assault and unlawful weapon possession” [4]. Once the police had swept all of the people out of the area, government sanitation workers were left with scrubbing the area of graffiti and trash. “’I was just stunned by the amount of graffiti, garbage and property destruction,’ Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best said after she walked around the area” [4]. No doubt the cleanup will take time and a fair amount of taxpayer money. The zone had no named leader and so it is hard to say if it had detailed goals or if it accomplished any of its goals. Some demands that were seen graffitied around CHOP called for the removal of 50 percent of the police force’s funding. Mayor Durkan did not oblige this request. She did, however “. . . [propose] a more modest $76 million cut amid a "reimagining" of police functions in Seattle” [5].

As with any major event, there are legal repercussions. “More than a dozen businesses in Capitol Hill filed a class-action lawsuit Wednesday evening against the City of Seattle for how officials handled the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, known as CHOP.The businesses based in Capitol Hill said they support free-speech rights and the efforts of the "Black Lives Matter" movement, but they filed the 56-page class action because of the constitutional rights of employees and residents in the Capitol Hill area” [6]. The businesses that were inside the CHOP zone witnessed the destruction of private property and felt unsafe from some of the protestors. Some business owners were threatened that attempts to remove graffiti would be met with vandalization or burning of their property [6]. Due to the social and cultural aspects of the protests, the businesses were reluctant to bring their case forward. But the slow action of the local government and mounting economic losses eventually persuaded the businesses to go forward with the class action lawsuit.

Private Citizens have also joined together to file a class-action lawsuit against the city. Jacob Bozeman, a Washington attorney, stated that “Allowing a group of people to say who comes, who goes, that's a violation of the 1st, 4th and 14th Amendments” [7]. He does have a point. Bozeman brought up another good point when he said, “what if every special interest group wanted to take over a portion of the city?” [7]. The government allowed a private group of citizens with political goals to occupy public property. This group set up barricades and monitored the activities that occurred within the premises while not allowing police and emergency services in. Imagine how a citizen that resided in the CHOP would feel if they held no or a conflicting political opinion with the mob of protestors. Knowing that police response would be delayed or non-existent if violence erupted. Citizens pay taxes and should be guaranteed a variety of city services in exchange for that payment. This was not the case in CHOP. The local government’s response and actions did not instill confidence in the minds of citizens that desired to feel safe.

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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/12/seattle-autonomous-zone-capitol-hill/

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/teen-who-died-in-chop-shooting-wanted-to-be-loved-those-who-knew-him-recall/

[3] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/shooting-at-seattles-chop-protest-site-leaves-2-in-criticalcondition/#:~:text=Two%20people%20have%20died%20and,protesters%20before%20CHOP%20was%20formed.

[4] https://nypost.com/2020/07/01/seattles-chop-full-of-destruction-after-cops-oust-protesters/

[5] https://komonews.com/news/local/durkan-best-slam-50-defunding-of-seattle-police-offer-compromise

[6] https://komonews.com/news/local/capitol-hill-businesses-file-lawsuit-against-city-for-handling-of-chop

[7] https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/chop-seattle-class-action-lawsuit-bozeman

Photo Credit: Cedar777

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Can Restaurants Survive Shutting Down Again?

Restaurants may close again | Ben Gabbe/Getty Images

Closing dining rooms once cost a lot of money, but closing twice could be even worse

At Twisted Soul Cookhouse and Pours in Atlanta, masked servers whisk plates draped in plastic to socially distanced tables separated by plastic screens, all beneath the hum of a ventilation system upgraded with UV filtration. Excess tables and chairs, including all bar seating, have been removed. An employee at the door provides complimentary masks to customers who arrive without them.

Twisted Soul chef and owner Deborah VanTrece has gone above and beyond recommended safety measures, a stark contrast to leadership in Georgia. Gov. Brian Kemp allowed restaurants to return to full indoor capacity on June 16, and the state has since seen surges in COVID-19 cases. VanTrece has provided a safer space at Twisted Soul, but it’s come at a cost: $5,000 to sanitize the building and install filtration systems, over $3,000 on partitions, daily costs for masks and hand sanitizer, and the emotional burden of dealing with combative customers who refuse to wear masks.

Those costs have forced VanTrece to consider closing the dining room and returning entirely to carryout, but sacrificing dine-in business doesn’t seem financially feasible either. The longer she and the team can hold out, the better the restaurant’s chances of surviving in the coming months, no matter how the health crisis unfolds.

“We’re praying we can keep going with the dining room open, but we’re also trying to prepare ourselves for the possibility that that might not be the reality,” VanTrece says. While daily costs of operating a COVID-era restaurant are significant, she describes dining room service as a financial Band-Aid. “It doesn’t cover the whole wound, but we’re not bleeding as quickly.”

VanTrece is just one of many chefs and restaurant owners across the country facing a second closure, either by choice or government mandate, amid rebounding cases of COVID-19. Officials in some areas have rolled back reopening plans and closed dining rooms. Other cities and states could follow if the pandemic continues unchecked.

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Here’s a look at some of the precautions we are taking to keep you safe while dining with us! Each table has been carefully placed six feet apart and is enclosed with partitioning screens. We have also installed a UV filtration system in our air conditioning unit that will be continuously cleaning all air that circulates throughout the dining room. We look forward to seeing you soon! ❤️

A post shared by Twisted Soul (@twistedsoulcookhouse) on Jun 17, 2020 at 8:19am PDT

In New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio nixed plans to allow indoor dining in June, Popina co-owner James O’Brien fears a second closure could be a death knell. After closing the restaurant’s dining room on March 25, he says the team tried focusing on takeout for about a week. But delivery didn’t provide enough business for the pasta-heavy outfit, especially since the restaurant operates delivery through its own website rather than a third-party platform. Like other restaurateurs turned grocers, the Popina team shifted toward offering pantry goods (including a cook-at-home pasta kit) and wine from their closed dining room.

Since the restaurant’s backyard reopened on June 24, 90 percent of business has come from outdoor dining, providing a glimmer of hope that the business can survive. If the restaurant can make enough money during the summer, before shutting down the patio sometime in the fall or winter, O’Brien says he might take a pay cut, reduce staff, and offer takeout through third parties to keep the restaurant going. But if an order to shut down comes sooner, he says Popina might close completely.

“The reality is, if we could bank enough money in the summer, when October and November come around, one of our options is close again until March of next year,” O’Brien says, though he admits that’s an emergency scenario since it would be incredibly difficult for staff laid off in the middle of winter. He considered asking his landlord to defer rent, but ultimately decided against it, since the deferred payments could land on the restaurant during an even worse period later in the year. For now, he’s maximizing profits while the sun is shining.

The situation is even bleaker for bars that drive business through drinks, like Cuban-inspired cocktail bar Palomar in Portland, Oregon. Owner Ricky Gomez began seating guests on the building’s rooftop on June 2, but for him, the economics don’t make sense for takeout. Unlike Oregon’s neighboring states, a state statute prohibits bars from selling to-go cocktails, and the Oregon Liquor Commission can’t override the law with a temporary measure. A solution would have to come from the state legislature in a special session, followed by Gov. Kate Brown’s signature.

“We do only 35 percent food revenue compared to alcohol revenue,” Gomez says. “With third-party vendors taking a large portion, we didn’t think it was financially viable for us to open up for to-go food solely.”

He’s currently relying on a PPP loan, which will see the business through until August. “If we’re shut down after that time, we would have to go back to our landlords to see about having them waive rent. If they did not, we would close for good,” he says. He points out that if he had spent his loan money immediately, the bar would already be closed. Like O’Brien, Gomez fears winter will be especially devastating without further assistance. “You’re going to see a second wave of closures in January and February. There’s a lot right now, but I think the second wave is actually going to be much worse because there isn’t the buffer of the PPP as well.”

Courtesy of Palmoar

Palomar rooftop seating

That fear is already guiding Gomez’s decisions, including about how many staff members to employ. With limited capacity on the rooftop, he could only bring back a fraction of his workers in order to remain profitable and build a financial buffer against closing outdoor seating in the future.

“I basically had to call staff members a second time and tell them we did not have a position for them. It felt like we had to lay them off twice,” he says. “Personally that’s the biggest gut-wrencher: laying people off twice that have done nothing wrong.” That experience could foreshadow what’s to come for many managers and owners if they have to shut dining rooms or outdoor dining.

Across town, the situation looks significantly different for Deepak Kaul, chef-owner at Bhuna. Pre-COVID, much of the Indian restaurant’s business came from downtown office workers during lunch. That business has dried up completely, Kaul says, and the restaurant hasn’t seen much interest since opening an outdoor dining area in late June.

“We’re not seeing any massive change here on our revenue. Maybe it’s too soon to tell, but there’s no ‘Holy smoke, we’re back in the game.’ We’re still down 50 percent if not more,” Kaul says. His customers remain wary about dining out, and he blames a few cavalier people who refuse to wear masks for scaring off would-be diners.

“I’m kind of hoping they do shut us down again, honestly. It’s a waste of my money and my time [to offer outdoor dining],” Kaul says. He would rather focus on delivery, where the restaurant has always had a strong presence.

Takeout is murkier for a restaurant like Riel in Houston, where Gov. Greg Abbott recently scaled back reopening following a virus surge. Following COVID-19 outbreaks at nearby restaurants, Riel recently closed temporarily to test the entire staff. (All the tests came back negative.) Yet even for a team willing to close to ensure customer and staff safety, shuttering the dining room for months isn’t an option as long as other businesses remain open to seat guests.

Ryan LaChaine, executive chef and partner, says Riel saw booming takeout business right after the state shut dining rooms in March. But as more restaurants pivoted to delivery, competition increased and sales dropped. When Gov. Abbott allowed restaurants to reopen at 25 percent indoor capacity, the Riel team held off, waiting until they could seat 50 percent inside. Others leapt to open as soon as they could.

“A lot of restaurants did open at 25 percent and then that hurt the to-go business even more because people could go out,” LaChaine says. “We don’t have the luxury of shutting down and waiting this out. We have rent. We have taxes. I have a staff that depends on a paycheck.”

The recent temporary closure at least proved the Riel team could shut down safely and quickly without too much waste, since the restaurant has operated with tighter inventory since reopening. Other owners also feel better positioned to close should they need to do so. O’Brien admits that when the team was cleaning out the Popina dining room during the first shutdown, he threw away a lot of inventory that could have been sanitized, a mistake he won’t make again.

Courtesy of Popina

Popina take-home pasta kits

Still, shutting down again could be just as frenetic as the first time if the order comes suddenly, as it did in California, or is complicated by conflicting statements, as happened in Miami-Dade County. Owners can monitor news to stay ready, but it’s ultimately impossible to fully prepare.

“We’re trying to be proactive, but it’s tough when there’s not a lot of leadership and a lot of guidance,” LaChaine says. “You want to know how to cook something? I can tell you that. You want to know what to do in a pandemic? I really have no idea.”

That unpredictability is causing a lot of anxiety for restaurant owners, even those like Mashelle Sykes, who foresaw the possibility of closing down again after reopening for indoor dining. Sykes runs Fusion Flare Kitchen and Cocktails in Detroit, where rising numbers of COVID-19 cases make it tough to plan for the future.

“People are a little afraid now because the numbers have gone back up,” she says. “They are confused. A lot of them are choosing not to eat in because of the risks.” Businesses may lose even more customers to confusion as cities and states rapidly announce new changes to public health policy.

That foreboding atmosphere only adds pressure to make the most of indoor and outdoor dining while they’re still available. As O’Brien puts it, “With all this uncertainty, how do we make the most money right now in the most responsible way?”

Rather than wait for the situation to change further, Kaul is considering getting ahead of the devastation. He doubts many downtown Portland offices will ever return, with employees working remotely for years to come, so he may drop lunch service altogether and stick to takeout in the evenings. “If you run lean, you survive. If you can’t run lean, you’re done,” he says. Gomez also foresees long-term problems for restaurant business. While the PPP program provides a short-term fix, he’s hoping government officials can get together on long-term tax breaks and other financial aid, as well as loosening regulations like those on to-go alcohol that prevent the industry from evolving.

As restaurants stare down a winter season that could foster another wave of COVID-19 cases, which may force even the most unwilling states to close dining rooms, most owners and chefs focus on the day-to-day. They need to squeeze the summer season for all the revenue they can.

“Right now, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel if I can keep the dining room open,” VanTrece says. “With each day, with each month we’re still here, we consider ourselves blessed we’ve done the right thing.”

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Restaurants may close again | Ben Gabbe/Getty Images

Closing dining rooms once cost a lot of money, but closing twice could be even worse

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A post shared by Twisted Soul (@twistedsoulcookhouse) on Jun 17, 2020 at 8:19am PDT

Courtesy of Palmoar

Palomar rooftop seating

Courtesy of Popina

Popina take-home pasta kits

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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On June 2, with schools in the northern Brazilian state of Pernambuco closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mirtes Renata Santana de Souza brought her 5-year-old son Miguel to work with her. Santana, 33, and her 60-year-old mother Marta both worked as maids for a wealthy white family: Sérgio Hacker, the mayor of the small town near the city of Recife, his wife Sarí Corte Real and their two children. The family were living on the fifth floor of a luxury tower block overlooking Recife’s seafront.

Around lunchtime Santana went out to walk the family’s dog. While a manicurist was doing Corte’s nails, Miguel said he wanted to find his mother. He kept running into the building’s elevators and Corte kept making him get out. But eventually, she let the 5 year old get in the elevator alone, and, according to CCTV footage, appeared to press the button for the tower’s top floor before the doors closed. (Corte maintains she only mimed touching the button and that it did not light up as it would have if activated). Miguel got out on the ninth floor. He then fell from a balcony, 114 feet, onto the ground outside the lobby where his mother and a building caretaker found him moments later. He died soon after arriving in hospital.

The tragedy has become a sensation in Brazil over the last month, as media outlets have breathlessly reported each twist and turn, from the details of the state police investigation, to emotional interviews with both Santana and Corte. After newspapers published an open letter from Corte asking Santana for forgiveness, Santana responded that it was “inhumane” to make such a request. “We know that she wouldn’t treat a friend’s son like that,” she wrote. “She acted like this with my son, as if he had less value, as if he could suffer any kind of violence for being ‘the maid’s son.’”

On July 14 Pernambuco’s public prosecutor announced he was charging Corte with “abandonment of a vulnerable person resulting in death”—a crime punishable by 4 to 12 years in prison. An aggravating factor in the case for the prosecutor, and for public anger, is that it happened during the pandemic. Santana was not meant to be working on the day her son died because state officials in Pernambuco had not declared domestic work—apart from caring for elderly or disabled people—as “essential” during its COVID-19 lockdown.

The case has become a lightning rod for anger about a wider form of social injustice in Brazil. It is still common for Brazil’s middle and upper class families to employ a full-time maid. The South American country has one of the world’s largest populations of domestic workers—more than 6.3 million, according to government figures from late 2019. Some 95% are women and more than 63% are Black, like Santana. Historians say this structure is a direct inheritance from slavery, which Brazil abolished in 1888—the last country in the Americas to do so. Domestic workers only achieved the same legal status as other professions in 2013 and advocates say they remain underpaid and routinely mistreated, with seven in 10 working informally.

Neither Santana nor Corte feel that Corte was racist towards Santana or her son, lawyers for both women tell TIME. But in the details surrounding Miguel’s death, activists see the dynamics of a country that has failed to reckon with how its history continues to shape the lives of Brazil’s 211 million people, 56% of whom are Black or biracial. “Many still insist there’s no racism in Brazil, because it’s so well structured that you sometimes don’t even perceive you’re suffering from it,” says Luiza Batista, 63, a Black former domestic worker and the president of labor union the National Federation of Domestic Workers (FENATRAD).

Miguel’s case has helped galvanize both Black Lives Matter protests against systemic racism, and a movement to strengthen protections for domestic workers during the pandemic. “When I heard about Miguel, I felt that our lives really don’t matter to those people,” Batista says. “We’ve always been treated differently, inhumanely. We can’t take it anymore. “

Leo Malafaia—AFP via Getty ImagesPeople demonstrate and demand justice for the death of five-year-old Miguel Otavio Santana da Silva, in Recife, Pernambuco State, northeastern Brazil, on June 5, 2020.

In the weeks leading up to Miguel’s death, the pandemic had already put a spotlight on systemic racism in Brazil. The first confirmed death from COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro was that of Cleonice Gonçalves, a Black domestic worker. She had caught the virus from her wealthy boss who had recently returned from a trip to Italy, officials told Reuters. As in the U.S. and elsewhere, COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted Brazil’s poor and Black communities, including domestic workers, who tend to live in neighbourhoods on the outskirts of cities, meaning long, risky commutes and poorer health and sanitation infrastructure. A June report from national research institute Fiocruz found “enormous disparities” in COVID-19 mortality of different races and classes, with a Black person who cannot read four times more likely to die after contracting the virus than a college-educated white person.

Many of Brazil’s 26 states have imposed local quarantine measures to prevent the spread of the virus, limiting activity that is not considered “essential work”–despite resistance to quarantine measures from President Jair Bolsonaro. At least four states included domestic work in the “essential” category. Batista, the union leader, sees that designation as deeply unfair given the country’s slowness to extend labor rights to domestic workers, and the low pay they still receive (an average of just $168 a month in late 2019). “When we are asking society to value our work, it denies us rights,” she says. “But when it comes time to serve, society judges our work to be essential. It’s very incoherent.”

The official recommendation of the attorney at Brazil’s federal Department of Labor is that domestic workers should be allowed to remain home with “guaranteed pay” while COVID-19 containment measures are in place. But less than half of employers surveyed by research institute Locomotiva said they were doing this. Of those who employ a domestic worker on a freelance basis, with no contract, 39% had let them go, while 23% said their employees were still working as normal during the pandemic. For workers with a contract, 39% of employers said their employees were still coming to work.

Batista says some employers’ expectation that domestic workers continue doing their jobs is a reflection of “a culture of slavery, of servitude that persists” in Brazilian society. “People think, ‘if I’m paying that woman to work in my house, then she should be here, I don’t care about the risk.’” At no point do they look at that person with empathy.”

Corte’s lawyer, Pedro Avelino, says the case has nothing to do with racism or discrimination. The families were very friendly, he says, adding that Santana, her mother and her son all came to stay in Corte’s house in Tamandaré, the town where her husband Sergio Hacker is mayor, for two months during the pandemic, before returning to Recife. “Miguel was treated very well. The time they spent in Tamandaré was like a holiday for him, playing all day with [Corte’s] children, in the pool, playing musical instruments.” He points out Santana and her family stayed in the guest room, not the maid’s room—even though there is one in the house. He also says that in the Recife building, Corte’s son, who recently turned 6, is allowed to use the elevator alone.

And despite the debate about racism provoked by her son’s death during the pandemic, Santana, Miguel’s mother, does not believe it was related to “social inequality stemming from race”, her lawyer Rodrigo Almendra tells TIME. But Almendra, who is white, argues that structural racism is nevertheless at play, embedded in the social and economic dynamic between the two families. “It’s in a lack of care, it’s in a Black boy being left to wander a massive building while his mother walks a dog.”

For activists, the Miguel case is a clear distillation of the systemic inequalities that make life very different for Brazil’s mostly Black working class and mostly white elite. The building Miguel fell from was one of two luxury apartment blocks called “the Twin towers,” which have been the target of controversy and legal battles around overdevelopment in Recife. Though Santana worked in the wealthy couple’s private homes, according to Brazilian media, the website of the local government in Tamandaré listed Santana as a municipal employee, on the public payroll. (Corte’s lawyer declined to comment on this.) State authorities are investigating the claims and Hacker faces calls for impeachment. And, in April, Hacker publicly acknowledged that he had tested positive for COVID-19, while Santana and her mother continued to work for his family at the house in Tamandaré.

“There are so many elements of our past in this case, in the structures that [underpin] it,” says Bianca Santana, 36, a writer and activist in Sao Paulo. “If you time-traveled to Brazil today from the 19th century, the race relations would look very similar.”

Brazil’s domestic work culture is directly linked to its history of slavery, experts say. By the time Brazil officially ended slavery 132 years ago, it had imported between 3.6 and 4.7 million slaves from Africa—more than any other country in the Americas. But after abolition, authorities largely left former slaves to fend for themselves, according to Larissa Moreira, 28, a historian studying the central African diaspora at the Federal University of São João del-Rei in Minas Gerais. “There was never an effort to incorporate Black people into the labor market,” she says. “A Black person didn’t start to be seen as a human being just because they stopped being a slave.” With little education, and racism rife among employers, many free Black people remained in the same kinds of work they had done as slaves, sometimes even at the same farms and houses where they had been enslaved. For many, particularly Black women, domestic work was the only option. At the beginning of the 20th century, seven out of ten formerly enslaved people were domestic workers, Moreira says. Race and domestic work remained so closely intertwined in Brazil that newspaper ads from the early and mid-20th century explicitly seek “a Black maid for domestic work,” she adds.

Though a vital source of work for Black women, domestic work was long considered a second-class form of employment. Until 1972, it wasn’t registered with authorities, and employers weren’t required to sign a work permit (which had been introduced in other industries in the 1930s). It was only in 2013 that a law was passed to give domestic workers the same rights as other professions, including a working day limited to 8 hours, overtime pay and employer pension contributions. Even today, domestic workers say they struggle to make sure employers uphold those rights, with 4.6 million working informally, without a signed permit or on a freelance basis.

This slow progress on domestic workers rights was intimately tied to the way Brazil approached race after the abolition of slavery, Moreira says. Instead of openly reckoning with systemic racial inequality, in the late 19th century Brazil’s leaders put forth a new identity for the country as a so-called “racial democracy”—a community founded on the harmonious mixing of Indigenous, white European, and Black African cultures. At the same time political and cultural elites promoted a policy of “whitening” the population, arguing that Black people should have children with white Europeans and their descendants, producing generations of increasingly lighter skinned biracial Brazilians.

“As a result we have a different kind of racism than in the U.S., where white supremacy has been more explicit,” Moreira says. Racial inequality in Brazil is stark: white people make up 44% of the population, but hold 79% of seats in the senate and earn on average 74% more than Black or biracial Brazilians. “But still there’s this idea of closeness, of a [Black] maid being like part of the family. That’s perverse because it legitimizes abuses,” Moreira says. In the case of domestic work, she notes, that means “white bosses asking ‘Oh can you stay two more hours? Can you come on the weekend?’ And that extra work might not be paid, because it’s a family thing.” It was common, before the 2013 law, for domestic workers to live six days a week in tiny and often windowless “maid’s rooms,” and be at their employer’s beck and call 24 hours a day.

Domestic workers also suffer more violent abuses. Santana, the writer, says she grew up surrounded by stories of beatings, sexual abuse, child labor and more during domestic work, told by her mother, grandmother and neighbours in her favela neighborhood, and later by her students when she became a teacher in adult education. One afternoon in the 1960s when Santana’s grandmother brought her mother and uncle to her employer’s home, a man offered the children a bar of chocolate which turned out to be soap. “My mother still tells that story with such a deep pain, because it was a situation of so much humiliation, and so much cruelty, for a child,” she says. “This kind of work is the site of so much violence. It leaves scars.”

Abuses like those still occur. In 2016, Joyce Fernandes, a domestic worker-turned-rapper, launched a Facebook page “I, domestic worker,” sharing testimonies from domestic workers about their experiences. The page, which was adapted into a book last year, brims with stories of humiliating and exploitative behavior by employers. According to FENATRAD, reports of abuse have increased during the pandemic. They say many domestic workers have been pressured to move in with their employer’s families during the quarantine.

Paulo Paiva—DPMirtes Renata Santana de Souza holding a photo of her son Miguel at her home in the neighborhood of Sucupira, south of Recife, Brazil on July 2, 2020.

Some are trying to turn overlapping anger about Miguel’s death and the exploitation of domestic workers during the pandemic into concrete change. “Justice for Miguel” is now a rallying cry not only in Recife, at protests organized there outside the apartment building where he died, but also in campaigns urging the passage of a law to ban domestic work from being classed as “essential.” In the first week of July, a hundred lawmakers, public figures and social justice movements sent a letter to the head of Brazil’s chamber of deputies urging him to push forward a vote on the law, calling Miguel’s death “a mark of the urgency” to act.

From Rio de Janeiro, a group of eight sons and daughters of domestic workers are running a campaign, “For the Lives of Our Mothers,” calling for paid furloughs for domestic workers. Their petition has been signed by 130,000 people, and they have raised thousands of dollars for grants for workers who have been laid off by their employers during the pandemic. Similar small scale fundraising drives have popped up elsewhere, including a program for funders to sponsor a freelance domestic worker during the pandemic in Sao Paulo.

Juliana Frances is the daughter of a Black domestic worker and started “For the Lives of Our Mothers”. She says Miguel’s case has hit young Black activists in Brazil hard because for many of them, it feels personal. “It could have been me,” the 30-year-old says. “So many times as a child I went to work with my mother, with my godmother, or I was left alone [at home]. I crossed the road alone while my mother was cleaning someone’s bathroom.”

Working-class Black women are becoming less reliant on domestic work, though. Frances, the first in her family to go to university, is part of a younger generation who have benefited from the expansion of social programs in Brazil in the early 2000s. The leftist government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva used profits from a commodity boom to target poverty reduction and expand education access, says Mauricio Sellman, a visiting scholar of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Dartmouth. “For the first time, in 2018/2019, you had the first generation of university graduates that is actually reflective of the class and race of the general population.” Since Brazil’s lurch to the right under President Bolsonaro, and a series of economic crises starting in 2014, funding for these welfare programs has been cut.

For Frances, an equally important change lies in generational attitudes to Brazil’s deep-rooted structural racism. ”My friends and I discuss it all the time, but my mother’s generation was forced, culturally, socially, to keep their mouths shut, to accept this idea of “racial democracy,” which muffled the discussion,” she says. “So now when I speak to her about it, I can see she’s really uncomfortable.” Though Black people have been protesting and mobilizing against racism in Brazil for decades, Frances says the events of the last few months—the pandemic, Miguel’s death, and Black Lives Matter protests—have created a “revolutionary, unprecedented moment” for Brazil’s mainstream debate. “I think that in 2020, it’s the first time we’ve seen a lot of people acknowledging that yes, we are a racist country and we need to talk about it. That is fundamental.”

Santana, the activist from Sao Paulo, says there’s another reason that Brazil’s discussion on race is becoming more open. During and after his election campaign in 2018, Bolsonaro, the far-right president, made a series of explicit racist remarks about Brazil’s indigenous and Black quilombo communities founded by former slaves —undermining more than ever before the idea of racial democracy. In doing so, he “authorized” some white Brazilians to express racist viewpoints, she says. “That was important for exposing what people think and feel, and now we’re in an increasingly explicit conflict [about racism],” she says. “Now, it feels like we’re on the cusp of an explosion.”

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A Prelude to Waterworld: Coronavirus, Climate Crisis, Financial Oligarchy's Indifference, Community, and a Primer for the Actual Final Days of Humanity

Panic buying.

That could go down as the single biggest buzzword compound of the 2nd Century of American History, and we're barely a quarter of the way through it. This is a piece about everything I could manage to absorb from what's even been happening in our country around the time I took to research and write all of it (most of the latter half of March and all of April, then most of May to link all of the citations, God have mercy), an idea of how we've found ourselves here, and what our future is going to look like upon finding our takeaways. First, let's see how fast I can rattle out what's been going on in these past two or so months. Hang on.

A pandemic has spread to every single United State of America, contiguous and outlying. Consumers and retail workers have experienced the first-hand effects of a demand shock unlike anything our generation has ever seen. As I put it to a fellow cashier in my own tense haul of food one week: it was like four or five consecutive snowstorms, followed by an indeterminate future of Christmas shopping. Shelves have cleared themselves of toilet paper at an alarming pace, along with wet wipes and paper towels, hand sanitizer, canned goods, baking ingredients, pasta, thermometers, safety gloves, and the Lord only knows what else. Company-imposed item limits for shoppers have gone into wide effect. As if our overwhelming use of materials made to wipe our asses wasn't threatening enough, people promptly began to resort to clothes.

After 7 full days of packed-out shopping, customers at my own store began crowding less in the interest of their own health - but those crowds didn't appear to be slumping back to something I would call "normal," especially since our store has stopped being open late in the wake of the public health crisis and has installed plexiglass germ shields between customer and staff. Still, we're being dealt hours like blackjack cards, all of us working ourselves out of our minds to meet the demand, given a provisional $2/hr premium because - and only because - we have a union, and spending a half hour after we close now to clean and sanitize every perceivable object in the front end together. This isn't just happening in my store; the experience has appeared to be universal among every store of every grocery chain in the city, and quite likely in the metro area at large. I would venture to say most of them aren’t getting raises for this. At the time now published, it's been 73 days since The President Donald John Trump declared a National Emergency; our state has been officially ordered to stay at home, but we've still had to buy groceries; and it’s barely been a month since we began to restock enough paper products to start lifting item limits. We’re still selling out of our generic brands, due to the fact that they have the lowest price point. Very Big Words.

Before the state order even rolled out (no puns), Boise's mayor announced that all bar and dine-in restaurant space would be closed for 30 days in caution of public health. Drive-thrus and cafes have been able to stay above water; however, a bunch of fledgling upstart bars and restaurants in the city (Surprise! Gentrification.) were forced to close indefinitely and the staff were all laid off, likely without severance pay. I say "likely," because I haven't dared to ask any of the laid off customers who I've spoken to, but I know how jobs in Boise, like Idaho, tend to go. More than 30,000,000 people in America have filed for unemployment benefits since the shit hit the fan. They've been forced to wait for weeks, in certain cases to even get in touch with someone at their local office. Previously, the U.S. repo market began to collapse, and so the federal reserve was obligated to magic $1,500,000,000,000 in insurance payouts out of thin air. Remember, this is the repo market, which only affects the stock market competitively and for some reason also directly involves the institutions that keep our banks running. This has nothing to do with the failures of Capitalism or the reasons why American legislators keep telling us that "we can't afford" things like single-payer healthcare and mandatory sick leave. PLEASE get your FACTS straight. Your logic, according to Slate Senior Business Correspondent and the new champion of Well, Actually Jordan Weissmann, simply “doesn’t much sense.”

On the note of healthcare: the American medical administration has been effectively disemboweled by our government's preparation for and handling of the virus. While we are still waiting for lab doctors to develop a vaccine, the “primers and probes” for testing were developed by virologists in Malaysia on January 11. Outside of China, countries across Asia, Europe, and Africa tested 10s to 100s of 1,000s of people throughout the ensuing weeks. Yet America - specifically, the American President - had some. How should I put this? Trouble. In a very handy timeline laid out by the Bulwark, we can behold the baffling weeks of inaction amid the global spread of the virus that Trump spent first ignoring and then reminding his Health and Human Services secretary about vaping in response to the imminent threat of widespread illness and death. He put a travel non-ban on China. Testing was extremely scarce without explanation. There came a medical equipment shortage that Trump failed to prevent, despite having years to prepare for literally anything like this. Hell, the National Security Council laid out a playbook on exactly what he should do to prepare for a pandemic during his first days in office.

Trump's apparent response to the NSC’s advice? We don't need that. We're a healthy country! We can just SAVE MONEY on ALL OF THIS.

In May of 2018, Trump heard from the CDC's Global Health Security team that America wasn't ready to handle the ripples of a global pandemic - so he You're Fired'ed the team's leader and disbanded its members. Budgeting! In January of 2019, the Director of National Intelligence issued a report from about a year prior asserting that the "increased frequency and diversity" of diseases worldwide signaled "the potential for a severe global health emergency that could lead to major economic and social disruption." This was listed as a threat to "Human Security" - while Trump was in the middle of forging his party through the longest partial government shutdown in our nation's history, in personal demand of funding for a southern border wall that could conceivably cost 10s of 1,000,000,000,000s of dollars to realize in its full scope. Deals! Fast forward to February of 2020, the virus began to waft over the Pacific coast, and suddenly America ran out of everything. Hand sanitizer. Gloves. Medical-grade masks. Testing kits. Kellyanne Conway got on the C-SPAN to insist that the virus was being contained despite all reports to the contrary, in response to the question of why testing kit production was only seeing a push as of the beginning of March. She told us to stop "politicizing" it and that it makes "no sense" to attack the President for his astonishingly willful ignorance and negligence. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma personally shipped 500,000 testing kits and 1,000,000 face masks to the U.S. via FedEx. Leadership!

Also, a democratic election kept happening this spring - or it didn't, depending on what you make of it. St. Patrick's Day 2020 happened upon a time that 4 states, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio, were scheduled to vote in the primary election for the Democratic Party's nominee for President. The CDC issued strategies for "social distancing" several days before Trump's Big Word Day, and yet the state leaders who were managing these typically socially crowded voting events didn't seem fazed. The 3 state secretaries and 1 board chairman released a joint statement proclaiming that they could still conduct their badly timed primaries in a "safe" way because they were "short." Primaries in which some millions of people would line up to each cast their ballot in a divider made of cardboard, which CV-19 has been reported to be able to live on for up to 24 hours. In states which were already closing a lot of the polling places in TOTALLY RANDOM XD precincts that may or may not have just been the ones with black people in them. Only Ohio chose to postpone their election day, at the last minute. The other 3 states were locked in. The DNC had nothing to say, and allowed March 17th to proceed as if they had nothing to consider. These three "elections" quickly became a mess, and a slap on the face to many of the voters in our country most vulnerable to suppression that was felt nationwide.

In Chicago, one of the youngest poll volunteers currently living livetweeted the morning in astonishment of the fact that their precinct's ballot materials just never arrived. They called their party leaders and election volunteers about it, and all of the consultants simply advised that they direct voters to polling places in which lines were 3 hours long. Voters in Arizona began to prep a lawsuit against their state for forcing through an election date when registered voters were physically prohibited from participating by the pandemic. Over 300,000 voters in Tampa Bay were impacted by poll closures after 300 or so poll workers suddenly dipped out of their commitments due to being very old people who were either ill or simply afraid of dying horribly. Somehow, someway, Democratic party leadership figured out how to make a balloted primary more dysfunctional than its caucuses. Did I say slap in the face of voters? Because I meant an open shit on the corpse of American "Democracy."

Oh, Joe Biden totally swept, by the way.

In the wake of all of this, Joe Biden himself was largely absent. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, began addressing the public on a near daily basis via the YouTube, drew over $2,000,000 in donations to national aid organizations, and fought like hell to push provisions actually modeling proper relief into our relief legislation. Hashtag WhereIsJoe started trending, and his campaign insisted that he was planning stuff. He made his first visually recorded appearance since speaking on election night 4 Bernie YouTube conferences later: a 79-second speech on Twitter that contained precisely no specific proposals for the relief bill which eventually cleared the Senate with Bernie's active guidance. The speech took place in a very real domestic office space in Biden's very actual home. Tara Reade has been publicly disgraced for telling and re-telling the story of something terrible that a man who has his own hair sniffing compilation ALLEGEDLY did to her. News networks and publications and Viewers alike persistently begged to know when Bernie was going to drop out of the race until campaigning wore down his good conscience. On Monday, April 13th, he endorsed Joe Biden for President, and has gone on to say that choosing not to vote for Hot Joe is “irresponsible.” Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and the single wealthiest person on Earth, has set up a fund for customers to give from the kindness of their hearts to help him pay sick leave to Amazon's independent contractors. The President has goaded his followers into protesting the governers who have shut down much of the service industry in the interest of public health, as well as anyone who would dare to tell them that being out in a large crowd of protestors is going to get people infected. This is where we are.

So much more than that even has been happening: I didn't get to the absolute hell on Earth of this pandemic in America's prisons, or the PLANDEMIC, or the myriad ways that people are trying to make literally everything that has transpired the results of China's failures and/or nefarious schemes. I don't even need to mention Bill Gates. All of this shit is enough to beg the question: How, exactly, did we end up here? What track were we riding on that was destined to lead us to such a buffoonish, negligent circus of political leadership? How did we find ourselves in a public health crisis as outright horrible as this? Well, I think that, maybe, I have some sort of idea. I'll try to make it short, I promise.

Let's scoot on back some 16 years to April of 2004, when MDs Steven Landers and Ashvini Sehgal published a study on health care lobbying in the American Journal of Medicine. Their findings for the year 2000 were that health care accounted for 15% of all federal lobbying expenditures in the country. Pharmaceutical companies lead the pack of spenders by a clear $50,000,000 that year, for a total of $96,000,000 that saw a 27% increase from 3 years prior. 20 years have passed.

But, of course, I'd be remiss if I pretended as if that was everything. No, we saw a lot more unfold around one Barack H. Obama. He won the Democratic nomination and the general election of 2008 due in large part to his promise that he would expand Medicaid to people living under or right around the poverty line. This manifested in a bill titled the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as THE OBAMACARE. It led to a government shutdown championed by House Republicans who would bury themselves alive before passing more funds for social welfare. This came months after the Supreme Court case brought against the Obamacare which concluded that a punitive tax on uninsured individuals is constitutional, but coercing state governments to comply with a federal expansion of Medicaid is not. The whole debacle ended with 1,000,000s of Americans left uninsured or underinsured. "Underinsured" means that incomprehensive health insurance policies have long been the standard for working Americans' coverage. Obama, who once promised to be "not-the-first-but-last" American President to have to reckon with our private health insurance system, simply shrugged his shoulders and moved on to managing the Forever War. About 11 years have passed.

But, of course, 20 Fucking 16. We could get into the abhorrent, unhinged circus that was and is Donald Trump's ongoing campaign for The Best President You've Ever Seen, but I'm trying to make this short. Let me tell you about what happened in America on our supposed “Left.” This was the first year that Mr. Bernard Sanders ran for President. He gave us absolutely no bullshit. He told us that our private market of health insurance is immoral. He promised he would do everything necessary to transition America into a fully, publicly accessible healthcare system. He wrote a bill to largely remove cannabis, America's Top Drug, that good good grass what our lawbooks apparently still acknowledge only as "marihuana" (sic), from our Controlled Substances Act. He told us that our environment, including much of our infrastructure, was crumbling and burning. He promised to actually plan for what our government needs to do to repair and sustain a habitat that is livable for a massive number of human beings. He drew historic crowds to rallies all throughout the country, spawning a new movement of American Socialism (i.e., humane welfare and criminal justice ideology) around his platform.

His eventual sole opponent in the Democratic Primary that year was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who, and I can’t believe I still have to apologize for saying this, is full of bullshit. She responded to our cries for Medicare for All as if we were Veruca Salt demanding a Golden Goose. She framed an American single-payer healthcare system as "a better idea that will never, ever come to pass" while simultaneously reminding us that "people can't wait!" for accessible medical assistance. She promised she would find a way to make healthcare “affordable” for everyone (which would mean free, coming out of a layperson’s mouth). We watched as media networks made virtually no mention of Bernie’s rallies or stirring speeches, choosing to focus primarily on Hillary Clinton’s victories and Donald Trump’s utter spectacle. We voted, often in crowded and scarce polling places, and watched as Hillary was declared the winner before the polls even closed. We watched voter suppression and misinformation run rampant. In Boise, we broke the Idaho Caucus showing out for Bernie, and booed our then-Mayor when he drunkenly slurred into a podium that Hillary was “the most progressive” candidate we could vote for. Sure, Bernie took Idaho, as well as Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Michigan, Alaska, Hawaii, and 15 other states. But that didn’t count for anything in the end. Hillary was declared the nominee the night before primary polls opened in California, and Tim Kaine (?) was her running mate. Then, Donald Trump became our President. 3 years and 3 months have passed.

Was that short? I don’t know. Honestly, it all goes back even further than 16 years, and I’m gonna get to that. I wish history could be shorter. I wish all of this could just be over now.

But, to quote Dr. Manhattan, “Nothing ever ends.” So, here we are, still somehow alive in this shithole country that just so happens to militantly occupy and/or run half of this shithole planet. Things are looking pretty grim. So forget the future for a second and let me explore the answer to the question of, “What are we even doing right now?” It is, at least relatively, a bright spot in all of this.

In as few words as possible, the answer is that people are stepping up to serve their communities. Let me walk back to “panic buying” and talk more about the retailers that are staying open in spite of a highly contagious pandemic. The services that these retailers provide have been able to fit under the typically broad legal definition of “essential,” and their workers have been deemed the same. The federal definition can be expanded at liberty of each state, and the bottom line in most states has become that any consumer retail establishment that can keep up with recommended sanitary guidelines on top of a still-functioning business model can stay open for anything except sit-in service. The line between people’s needs and wants has become, predictably, blurred by the Money Machine (oh yeah), and so these establishments and services have panned out further than one might expect. These aren’t just grocery workers: they are liquor store workers, smoke shop and dispensary workers, kitchen staff, delivery drivers, phone store associates, sign spinners. Most major retailers and their workers aside from the GameStop are still on the clock, believe it or not. It doesn’t entirely matter to business what people objectively need; they’re still buying booze and weed and smokes and ice cream and new phones (personally guilty, my old external camera got fucking wrecked, folks) and - above and most imperatively of all else - Nintendo Switches. These are still essential goods to somebodys, and all the somebodys that must be there to assist them are holding their place, in gloves and masks behind transparent plastic germ shields. They’ve called us “rockstars” and “heroes” and a whole bunch of other bullshit. In reality, the double-edged miracle is that some fragment of our behemoth collective economy is still functioning through this crisis, and millions of people are still out here able and diligently willing to work at serving it for the sake of their customers and each other’s livelihood.

Maybe that isn’t such an optimistic take. Maybe it’s not that even a little bit, so here’s something else that I’ve been able to observe: in the wake of our U.S. government’s objective failure to provide for its people, a proto-anarchist movement of mutual aid micro-collectives have surged immensely in the age of social media. “Micro-collectives” is a fancy word I prefer to use for the term “facebook groups.” An innumerable mass of these groups have been formed across the country in response to our crisis. Communities have been able to use these groups to request and provide critical assistance from and to each other, as well as for a predictably spotty source of information. Peers in my area didn’t really like the way that the general Idaho group was being run - so we split off and formed our own, aimed at sustaining mutual aid through this health crisis and beyond. We started off gathering tents and sleeping bags for the homeless. We’ve gone on to distribute donated supplies to community members in need on a weekly basis. We’ve set up an ongoing rent relief fund. We’ve spotted each other sewing supplies for mask making. We are present. We are alert.

So what can be learned from such immense calamity and personal resilience? Well, the first lesson I found from this is what actual anarchists in America have likely been trying to say for years: we do not need to organize the destabilization of government, for global capitalists will do so more efficiently and totally than we ever could. We are seeing it now with our very own eyes. The fact is, this American government has long been set up to fail us; it has failed us for generations; and its public authority will continue to fail and incrementally collapse until nothing of it is left. We the People will be the only institution left to protect and provide for ourselves, and each other. This is important, because things are going to get better for a while. But, and I hate to keep writing this, they will proceed to get worse. Much worse. You think this is bad, right now? Well, you’re definitely right, but the conditions of our planet are primed to make things exponentially worse. I’m talking about an all-out, fully apocalyptic shitshow.

Let’s back up again. It’s July 28, 1995. A movie titled “Waterworld” has premiered in theaters, which would begin to become relics less than 25 years later. It takes place on a future Earth in which the polar continents have completely melted. The world is water and vice versa, leaving global denizens afloat on their own devices. Kevin Costner plays our Hero, the Mariner, Captain of a badass mechanical trimaran, gills behind his ears. He sails around scavenging for floating sacks of dirt that he can trade. So goes the premise of this “post-apocalyptic” sci-fi fodder. Reviews are mixed. In his review, Roger Ebert says, “It could have been better.”

Time to go way, way back now. It’s July, the summer of 1977. Barracuda is climbing the Billboard Hot 100. James F. Black, leading scientist in the Exxon Corporation’s Research and Engineering division, is addressing a meeting of executives at headquarters with some rather alarming findings. He reports a “general scientific agreement” upon the evident fact that human consumption of fossil fuels has had a negative impact on our global climate. A year later, he makes a larger presentation of the department’s findings, which entails that increased concentration of Co2 in our atmosphere could cause global temperatures to rise by as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit. He writes, “present thinking [in this, the year of 1978] holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” 9 years later, a researcher named James Hansen testifies before a U.S. Congressional Committee that “the global warming predicted in the next 20 years [starting now, in the year of 1987] will make the Earth warmer than it has been in the past 100,000 years.”

It’s the summer of 1991, and the Cold War ends. The George C. Marshall Institute, a right-wing think tank that has heretofore been occupied with making people pissy-pants terrified of the hypothetical nuclear powers of the USSR, now struggles to find a new political concern.

It’s the summer of 1995 again, and a record-cracking heat wave makes history in Chicago. Temperatures reach 106 degrees Fahrenheit. 778 people die, most of them in poor neighborhoods that lack air conditioning utilities and probably have a very low number of people interested in seeing Waterworld. This comes a year after the GCM Institute published a paper titled Global warming and ozone hole controversies: A challenge to scientific judgement. The paper sought to cast doubt on the scientific consensus around Co2’s effect on our atmosphere. It also claimed that there was no evidence to support the notion that secondhand smoke is harmful "under normal circumstances."

It’s the Fall of 2008. Barack Obama is running his first campaign for President with Joe F. Biden, and the Guardian posts an article about his opponent’s briefly famous VP pick, Sarah Palin. If you don’t remember her, just try to imagine Hillary Clinton as a Republican. Anyway, this article goes into detail about how Palin used bad science to keep polar bears from being protected as an endangered species in Alaska, where she was the governor. The article reports that one of the “scientists” involved in this “research” was a former senior official at the George C. Marshall Institute, and that the Institute has received $715,000 in funding from ExxonMobil in the previous decade.

It's the Spring of 2010. Gallup publishes the results of their annual poll on global climate change. They entail that 67% of Americans surveyed do not believe that the effects of it will seriously impact them in their lifetime. Only 52% of them are sure that it's happening at all. The institute has done outstanding work.

It’s the Summer of 2018, and Douglas Rushkoff has used Medium to publish a jarring glimpse of our ruling class as it truly is: callously, matter-of-factly psychotic. In a piece titled “Survival of the Richest,” the well-known tech lecturer details a event-for-hire on the “future of technology” that turns out to be more of an intimate seminar. Before Rushkoff can even think about getting into his spiel, his full audience is delivered in the form of 5 hedge fund tycoons who immediately begin to unload their questions about the future on him. Eventually, the question arises around what their options will be to protect their assets in consequence of what they call “the event” - which is to say, the absolute collapse of society. Rushkoff writes:

"This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time."

This is what Ronald Reagan once referred to as “trickle-down economics.”

It’s the Summer of 2019, and everything is literally on fucking fire. 259,523 acres of land, about 405.5 square miles, burn over the course of 6 months in the state of California. An unprecedented fire season in Alaska - yes, Alaska - burns over 2,400,000 acres. In Australia, fires rage from mid June for the following 8 or so months, spreading from shore to shore, burning about 46,000,000 acres of land and killing 1,000,000,000 animals. Several endangered species there may now be guaranteed to go extinct. The Amazon Rainforest, the Earth’s largest recycler of carbon dioxide into pure oxygen, starts lighting up in January and burns largely uncontained until October. While a lot of the fires are wild here, plenty more of them are started by slashing and burning for industrial development. These illegal fires happen because the government leaders that are in charge of preserving the forest - most notably one Jair M. Bolsonaro - aren’t particularly keen on enforcing deforestation laws. By the end of 2019, fires claim over 2,240,000 acres of the Amazon, which is somehow not as much as what burned in fucking Alaska, but is arguably more alarming in the bigger picture. Though honestly, that’s really hard to judge.

Finally, it’s May of 2020, the middle of the beginning of the end. The pandemic is popping all the way off, many of us have little choice but to stay in our homes and wait for it to end, many others are expected to work to keep society functioning at a minimal level, and we have a Republican President who has led his disciples into proudly defying public health recommendations in the name of “re-opening the country.” It’s become one of our citizens’ favorite past-times to dunk on Donald “Trump Steaks” Trump, but the point of me slaving over this history lesson is to recognize the full truth: America has been built up and maintained for a President exactly like him.

Let me, at last, get to my point here. Sometime in March while I was writing this, an Oakland nurse named John Pearson went on Chapo for an interview. He detailed the ways in which this pandemic is a “crisis on top of a crisis;” America can only flatten the curve so much to combat the deaths caused by lack of health insurance and the state of underfunded hospitals run by overworked staff. He said, “we need to make sure this never happens again.” However, now, in the scope of all of this, we can see that our future as it pertains to how well-prepared we can become for any number of impending crises does not look very promising at all. Every day that goes by, the powers that have locked us into utter societal decay become that much more unconquerable. We can all see what’s coming down the pipeline: There will be more fires. The oceans will rise. Untold 1,000,000s of humans will be forced to evacuate their homes. The animals and the ecosystems of our planet will relentlessly continue to die. We can see now, as clear as the afternoon sky in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, that every person with the means to actually stop it all and save humanity will sit and watch the rest of us suffer through binoculars.

Try to picture Waterworld II, in which Barron Trump is drifting aboard a destitute yacht, out on the ocean somewhere above what used to be New Jersey. Every other member of his family has been publicly executed by the workers’ mob. He meets a fellow Yachter and tries to trade some of the last $100 bills ever made, the ones with the blue stripe, for some of the last bottled water in existence. There’s probably a gunfight. Barron Trump probably wins, because he is probably the hero of America’s story. This is our future.

So, what? What the fuck are you supposed to do about all of this, I can hear you asking. You. Here’s the thing: if there were ever a good time to get into Doomsday Planning, that time is right now, at the end of the Spring of 2020. In my opinion, you, a reader, should start seeking answers for a lot of questions that you probably don’t like to think about. For example: What am I going to do to prepare myself for the worst, most apocalyptic conditions possible? What’s my plan to protect and provide for myself and the people I care about? What am I going to do for the people who will be the least secure in such chaos? These are hard questions, and that’s why you need to settle the answers for them as soon as you can.

Once you find the answers to what you’re going to do, you should think about when will be the best time to start putting those plans into action, because your answer will probably be immediately.

Now and forever, we are the only ones here who are going to take care of each other. There are only so many people doing the work right now, and they can only save so many of us without you. The going is rough, and it will only get rougher from here on out.

It’s time to get going.

Donate to:

Anarchist Black Cross

Center for Health Justice

The Community Justice Exchange's National Bail Fund Network

Feeding America

Food Not Bombs

The Movement for Black Lives

National Alliance to End Homelessness

United for Respect

Partners in Health

United Way

Volunteers of America

Your local shelter(s).

Relief funds in your city.

Find opportunities to volunteer at:

Many of the organizations listed above.

The Mutual Aid Hub

#politics #mostly u.s. history #wait4waterworld

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dailymemesworld · 4 years

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A 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship, the Comfort, docked in Manhattan. Federal guidelines warning against travel and gatherings were extended through April. In Washington, talk turned to expanding paid sick leave.

RIGHT NOW

About three out of four Americans are or will soon be under instructions to stay at home. In New York, the governor said that 1,218 people had died, and that 9,517 people in the state were hospitalized with the virus.

Here’s what you need to know:

As the virus’s impact expands, Washington mulls more emergency measures.

China says it’s halting the virus’s spread. Is that true?

Agony in Spain and Italy as deaths climb and lockdowns are extended.

“Doctors are getting sick everywhere.” Health workers confront fear as colleagues fall ill.

As the virus spreads behind bars, there are calls rising to free inmates.

The virus sweeps into Detroit, a city that has seen its share of hardship.

Oil prices are sliding as energy demands erode.

Image

Lawmakers left the Capitol after voting on the coronavirus stimulus plan on Friday.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

As the virus’s impact expands, Washington mulls more emergency measures.

As the toll of the coronavirus continued to mount — overwhelming hospitals and sickening health care workers, spreading through jails, playing havoc with the economy and making deadly inroads in more cities — federal lawmakers and Trump administration officials turned their attention Monday to new measures to try to contain the fallout.

In a sign of how fast the virus is upending life in the United States, officials in Washington were already beginning to chart the next phase of the government’s response on Monday — just days after enacting a $2 trillion stabilization plan, the largest economic stimulus package in modern American history.

Continue reading the main stor

“We have to pass another bill that goes to meeting the need more substantially than we have,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on Sunday, ticking off a list of Democratic priorities, including increased protections for workers on the front lines and a further expansion of the paid sick leave provisions approved in previous legislation.

Maryland became the latest state to issue a stay-at-home directive on Monday, meaning that roughly three out of four Americans are or will soon be under instructions to stay indoors as states try to curb the spread before their hospitals are overwhelmed. And school systems around the country have extended closings that superintendents once hoped would be brief.

See Which States and Cities Have Told Residents to Stay at Home

In an attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus, more than half the states and the Navajo Nation have given directives, affecting about three in four U.S. residents.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has favored local action over statewide mandates, said he would sign an order codifying a patchwork of local rules urging residents of the southeast corner of the state to remain at home. It would apply to Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe Counties.

Local Florida governments have taken wildly different approaches to restricting interactions. While the city of Jacksonville shut down its beaches, St. Johns County to the south did not. A striking photo taken over the weekend showed bare beaches on one side of the county line and crowded sand on the other. (St. Johns County later closed its shoreline.)

Continue reading the main story

President Trump — who retreated Sunday from his earlier hope to get the country back to normal by Easter after public health experts warned that lifting the social distance guidelines too soon could lead to far more deaths — continued to express optimism. Mr. Trump said Monday that he and his advisers expected the number of people who test positive to peak around Easter, though he cited no data to back up his claim.

“That’s going to be the highest point, we think, and then it’s going to start coming down from there,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on Fox & Friends. “That will be a day of celebration, and we just want to do it right so we picked the end of April.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ leading infectious disease expert, said on Monday that the country as a whole would see the death toll rise.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw over 100,000 deaths,” he said.

A 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship, the Comfort, docked in Manhattan Monday morning to free up beds in the city’s overwhelmed hospitals so they can treat more coronavirus patients. A small field hospital was being constructed in tents in Central Park. And in hospitals and clinics around the city, typically dispassionate medical professionals are feeling panicked as increasing numbers of their colleagues get sick.

Video

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1:12U.S. Navy Hospital Ship Comfort Ship Arrives in New York City

A 1,000-bed Navy ship, the Comfort, has 12 operating rooms, a medical laboratory and more than 1,000 officers.CreditCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The economic toll continued to be staggering. Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury, said on Monday that with stores closed and sales down it would furlough the majority of its employees this week. Macy’s had 130,000 part-time and full-time employees as of Feb. 2. And oil prices hit their lowest levels since 2002 on Monday as Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell nearly 6 percent to $23.50 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. marker, briefly fell below $20.

The sharp economic contraction caused by the spreading coronavirus epidemic is causing demand for oil, the world’s largest source of energy, to evaporate

Continue reading the main story

In jails and prisons, where social distancing is impossible and sanitizer is widely banned, authorities across the country have moved to release thousands of inmates to try to slow the infection, but the infections continued. The Rikers Island jail complex in New York City had at least 139 confirmed cases of the virus. A week ago, the Cook County jail in Chicago had two diagnoses; by Sunday, 101 inmates and a dozen sheriff’s deputies had tested positive. And at least 38 inmates and employees in the federal prison system have the virus, with one prisoner dead in Louisiana.

And in Detroit, an American city that has seen more than its share of struggles in recent years, the virus was posing a new, lethal test. In less than two weeks, 35 people with the virus have died there. The police chief tested positive for the virus, and more than 500 police officers are in quarantine.

“Everybody is starting to understand that this virus is looking for more hosts,” Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit said in an interview. “Even if you’re young and healthy.”

By Sunday evening, with more than 5,400 cases, Michigan was fourth in known cases among the states, behind New York, New Jersey and California.

#Lm creators

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phgq · 3 years

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SK Kibungan extends help during COVID pandemic

#PHinfo: SK Kibungan extends help during COVID pandemic

BAGUIO CITY, Jan. 12 (PIA) - - With the COVID-19 pandemic taking toll on people’s lives, the Sangguniang Kabataan in Kibungan, Benguet engaged in activities to ease the impact of the health crisis in their area.

SK Kibungan Federation President Krizza Mae Balawen shared the SK experience and how they assisted during the pandemic in today’s Laging Handa Network Briefing News with Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary Martin Andanar.

The youth were involved in the distribution of hygiene and sanitation kits in schools while carrying out activities in keeping one’s sound mental well-being through the conduct of amateur painting and spoken poetry competition.

Dubbed as “Oplan Waras” (Operation Distribution) or #Oplan#Waras, the SK distributed sanitation and hygiene kits to four elementary schools and 10 child development centers. Also provided with sanitation kits were the Madaymen Barangay Hall and Kibungan Extension Office.

Balawen they also gave kits for use of teachers who report to school from time to time.

The hygiene and sanitation kits that contained face mask, face shield, alcohol, and basic toiletries, and disinfectants were worth about P250, 000.00.

School and office supplies were also provided to the child development centers for workers and in support to the blended learning modules of school children amounting to P30, 000.00

Balawen also shared that during the celebration of the Linggo ng Kabataan last October, the SK focused their activities in keeping the youth’s sound mental being during the pandemic by conducting spoken poetry and amateur painting contests.

The SK also assisted the local government led by Mayor Cesar Molitas in the distribution of relief goods, devising data base of the Social Amelioration fund subsidy, distribution of health declaration forms, information education campaign on the adherence to COVID-19 health protocols.

These activities provided the youth avenue for growth and development not only professionally but personally as well. Their engagement with the community also gave them the opportunity to enhance their communication and leadership skills.

“I am just surprised I am able to accomplish things I didn’t know I was capable of,” Balawen said.

She encouraged the youth to be cooperative and to participate more as these are crucial factors .She hopes that their full force cooperation this year will be seen not only in the fight against COVID-19 but in all the activities of the SK. (JDP/SCA-PIA-CAR, Benguet)

***

References:

* Philippine Information Agency. "SK Kibungan extends help during COVID pandemic." Philippine Information Agency. https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1063640 (accessed January 12, 2021 at 09:40PM UTC+08).

* Philippine Infornation Agency. "SK Kibungan extends help during COVID pandemic." Archive Today. https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1063640 (archived).

#Philippines #News #Filipino #Pinoy #Tourism #Politics #Culture #Editorial #Environment #Society #History

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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Can Restaurants Survive Shutting Down Again added to Google Docs

Can Restaurants Survive Shutting Down Again

Restaurants may close again | Ben Gabbe/Getty Images

Closing dining rooms once cost a lot of money, but closing twice could be even worse

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Twisted Soul (@twistedsoulcookhouse) on Jun 17, 2020 at 8:19am PDT

Courtesy of Palmoar Palomar rooftop seating

Courtesy of Popina Popina take-home pasta kits

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/2020/7/22/21331524/can-restaurants-survive-second-covid-19-shut-down-pandemic

Created July 22, 2020 at 09:26PM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

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morningusa · 4 years

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Many of the nation's 3.5 million teachers found themselves feeling under siege this week as pressure from the White House, pediatricians and some parents to get back to physical classrooms intensified -- even as the coronavirus rages across much of the country.On Friday, the teachers' union in Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest district, demanded full-time remote learning when the academic year begins on Aug. 18, and called President Donald Trump's push to reopen schools part of a "dangerous, anti-science agenda that puts the lives of our members, our students and our families at risk."Teachers say crucial questions about how schools will stay clean, keep students physically distanced and prevent further spread of the virus have not been answered. And they feel that their own lives, and those of the family members they come home to, are at stake."I want to serve the students, but it's hard to say you're going to sacrifice all of the teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers and bus drivers," said Hannah Wysong, a teacher at the Esperanza Community School in Tempe, Arizona, where virus cases are increasing.School systems struggling to meet the financial and logistical challenges of reopening safely will need to carefully weigh teachers' concerns. A wave of leave requests, early retirements or resignations driven by health fears could imperil efforts to reach students learning both in physical classrooms and online.On social media, teachers across the country promoted the hashtag 14daysnonewcases, with some pledging to refuse to enter classrooms until the coronavirus transmission rate in their counties falls, essentially, to zero.Now, educators are using some of the same organizing tactics they employed in walkouts over issues of pay and funding in recent years to demand that schools remain closed, at least in the short term. It's a stance that could potentially be divisive, with some district surveys suggesting that more than half of parents would like their children to return to classrooms.Big districts like San Diego and smaller ones, like Marietta, Georgia, are forging ahead with plans to open schools five days per week. Many other systems, like those in New York City and Seattle, hope to offer several days per week of in-person school.Adding to the confusion, optional guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in May set out ambitious safety precautions for schools. But the president, and many local school system leaders, have suggested they do not need to be strictly followed, alarming teachers.Many doctors, education experts, parents and policymakers have argued that the social and academic costs of school closures on children need to be weighed alongside the risks of the virus itself.The heated national debate about how and whether to bring students back to classrooms plays upon all the anxieties of the teaching profession. The comparison between teachers and other essential workers currently laboring outside their homes rankles some educators. They note that they are paid much less than doctors -- the average salary nationwide for teachers is about $60,000 per year -- but are more highly educated than delivery people, restaurant workers or most staffers in child care centers, many of whom are already back at work.Now, as teachers listen to a national conversation about reopening schools that many believe elevates the needs of the economy and working parents above the concerns of the classroom work force, many are fearful and angry. They point out that so far Congress has dedicated less than 1% of federal pandemic stimulus funds to public schools stretching to meet the costs of reopening safely.The message to teachers, said Christina Setzer, a preschool educator in Sacramento, is, "Yes, you guys are really important and essential and kids and parents need you. But sorry, we don't have the money."Earlier in the shutdown, Trump acknowledged the health risks to teachers over the age of 60 and those with underlying conditions, saying at a White House event in May that "they should not be teaching school for a while, and everybody would understand that fully."But this week, as the administration launched a full-throated campaign to pressure schools to reopen in the fall -- a crucial step for jump-starting the economy -- it all but ignored the potential risks teachers face. More than one-quarter of public schoolteachers are over the age of 50.Teachers say many of their questions about how schools will operate safely remain unanswered. They point out that some classrooms have windows that do not reliably open to promote air circulation, while school buildings can have aging heating and cooling systems that lack the filtration features that reduce virus transmission.Although many districts are spending millions this summer procuring masks, sanitizers and additional custodial staff, many teachers say they have little faith that limited resources will stretch to fill the need.They also worry about access to tests and contact tracing to confirm COVID-19 diagnoses and clarify who in a school might need to isolate at home in the event of a symptomatic student or staff member.The CDC has advised against regular testing in K-12 schools, but Wednesday, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said the Trump administration was exploring whether testing being developed for other vulnerable environments, like nursing homes, could be used in schools.Indeed, educators have had to process a head-spinning set of conflicting health and safety guidelines from Washington, states and medical experts.The CDC has recommended that when schools reopen, students remain 6 feet apart "when feasible," while the American Academy of Pediatrics released guidelines suggesting that 3 feet could be enough space if students wore masks.But after major pushback from educator groups, who felt there was too little attention on the health risks for adults who work in schools, the Academy joined with the two national teachers' unions Friday to release a statement saying, "Schools in areas with high levels of COVID-19 community spread should not be compelled to reopen against the judgment of local experts."In Arizona, Wysong, 30, said she was willing to return to her Tempe classroom; she is not in a high-risk category for complications from COVID-19 and her school caps classes at 15 students. But given the long-term teacher and substitute shortage in Arizona, which has some of the lowest educator salaries in the nation, she said she believed the overall system could not reopen safely with small enough class sizes.Health and education experts who support reopening schools have sometimes questioned the need for strict physical distancing, pointing in recent weeks to emerging research suggesting that children may be not only less likely to contract COVID-19, but also less likely to transmit it to adults.In interviews, many teachers said they were unaware of or skeptical of such studies, arguing that much about the virus remains unknown, and that even if teachers do not catch coronavirus in large numbers from children, it could be spread among adults working in a school building, or during commutes to and from schools via public transit.The education systems in Germany and Denmark have successfully reopened, but generally only after local virus transmission rates were brought under control.American schools currently have a variety of plans for welcoming students back to campuses, ranging from regular, five-day schedules with children using desk partitions to stay distanced, to hybrid approaches that seek to keep students physically distanced by having them attend school in-person only a few days per week, and spend the rest of their time learning online from home.In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week that the nation's largest school system would reopen only part-time for students this fall, but teachers would most likely be back in classrooms five days a week.The teachers' union president, Michael Mulgrew, has said he does not believe schools can reopen at all if the city does not receive additional federal funding this summer.With many teachers reluctant to return to work, according to polls, staffing will be a major challenge for districts across the country. New York estimates that about 1 in 5 of its teachers will receive a medical exemption to teach remotely this fall.Matthew Landau, a history teacher at Democracy Prep Charter High School in Harlem, hopes he will be one of them. He survived stage four cancer several years ago and said he does not feel comfortable going back to his classroom."I feel there's no way to keep immunocompromised teachers safe," he said.Kevin Kearns, a high school English teacher at the High School of Fashion Industries in downtown Manhattan, has spent the last few weeks wrestling with his own dilemma.Kearns and his wife became parents in March, and need child care for their infant son. Their only option is to have Kearns' mother-in-law, who is in her 70s, stay with them. Kearns is terrified of bringing the virus home."I don't want to go back, I don't think it's safe to go back, but I don't know that I necessarily have a choice," he said.Still, Kearns said he feels a duty to the mostly low-income, Black and Latino students he teaches."It puts me in a very difficult moral conundrum," he said, "to choose between supporting my community, students, colleagues and my own family's safety."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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beautytipsfor · 4 years

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'I Don't Want to Go Back': Many Teachers Are Fearful and Angry Over Pressure to Return

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2ZsUXON via Beauty Tips

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2CtOGcy

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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‘Kind Bars Are the Food of the Revolution’

Grabbing sustenance from the People’s Bodega | Jaya Saxena

The People’s Bodega is a traveling food and necessities pantry providing protesters with the fuel they need to keep going

Over the past month, mass protests calling for the abolition of police and a national reckoning with anti-Blackness have spread across the country. In that time, various volunteers and organizations have risen to the challenge of feeding those on the frontlines, like the Sikh gurdwaras serving dal to hospital workers and protesters, or the good samaritans, unaffiliated with any organization, handing out snacks at marches. And then there’s the People’s Bodega, a mutual aid organization that considers the needs of the community and packs them into a van.

The People’s Bodega is, essentially, a traveling food and necessities pantry. In New York and LA, it caters to protests, its vans driving to different parts of a march to make sure everyone is served. Though the People’s Bodega began in LA, the word “bodega” has a distinctly New York (specifically Nuyorican) feel. The bodega is your neighborhood spot where you know the person behind the counter; it’s the center of your community, even if that community is just your block. You can be fed there, yes, but also pick up first-aid supplies, housewares, phone cards, or any other small things you need to live your day-to-day life. The People’s Bodega takes that concept and brings it to the protests, supplying water, sports drinks, and snacks alongside hand sanitizer, sunscreen, condoms, and tampons (plus, if you feel like hopping in the back of the van, a place to change your tampon). But unlike your neighborhood convenience store, everything is free.

Jaya Saxena

One of the vans

On June 28, the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall riots, I rode with the People’s Bodega to serve New York’s Queer Liberation March. Organized by the Reclaim Pride Coalition, the march was “for Black lives and against police brutality.” Thousands gathered in glitter, leather, and shirts reading “BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER.” The People’s Bodega set up two tables in Manhattan’s Foley Square, where the march began. It was 1 p.m. and people were hungry and thirsty, everyone aware of the fact that they’d need to be full and hydrated as they marched in the 88-degree heat. The provisions the People’s Bodega supplies are calibrated for a marcher’s needs — enough food and water to keep you going, but never too much to slow you down.

Making its way to Washington Square Park, the march took a slightly circuitous route to avoid police presence. The People’s Bodega volunteers packed into two vans and tracked the movement on their phones, weaving through the streets of downtown Manhattan to meet up with the march halfway through its route. In the back of the van, towers of water shifted and teetered with each turn. Chloe, one of the organizers, emphasized to me that all the supplies have been donated: Even though the volunteers put out calls for specific staples on Instagram, they’re not always in control of what they get.

That day, they estimated they’d give out about 1,600 bottles of water, as well as plenty of Nature Valley and Nutrigrain bars, but also fruit snacks, lollipops, a box of store-brand Graham crackers, and some coveted packets of Oreos and Nutter Butters. There were a few cases of day-camp favorite Little Hug, those neon-colored fruit drinks that come in barrel-shaped bottles. Sometimes, people drop off homemade sandwiches or whole pizzas, though that’s rare. Some items are always around: “Kind bars,” Chloe says, “are the food of the revolution.”

It was hard to convince people that the supplies were free. But on a sweltering day when people had already marched for a mile, the organizers at the People’s Bodega pushed cold water and sports drinks, granola bars and clementines and fruit snacks, repeating again and again that these items cost nothing until people were convinced. Yes, at least in this instance, these basic human needs cost nothing.

Once the confusion over cost (or lack thereof) is settled, the demonstrators are typically thrilled and grateful. Once the march caught up with us, the People’s Bodega volunteers ran in a constant loop from van to table, carrying pallets of water and Costco-brand sports drinks, which went so fast they never even made it into the cooler. Cries of “Thank you!” and “Oh my god, you’re angels!” emanated from the crowd, the humidity outside building to a storm that would erupt later that night. Everyone was drained, but at the sight of snacks, they turned giddy. Sugar and salt would keep them going.

Jaya Saxena

Providing these essentials for free, whether it’s a single granola bar or dozens of breakfast sandwiches for the people occupying City Hall, is what Chloe believes mutual aid is all about: using what we have to make sure everyone gets what they need. “The point is avoiding the direct exchange of money for goods,” she said. When I ask if any of the food has come from restaurants or grocery stores to support the mission, she shakes her head. “All our donations come from people.” Sometimes the donations are food, and other times they’re in the form of monetary donations through PayPal.

The question hovering over the protests currently is: How long is this going to last? Right now, we’re in a perfect storm for public actions — mass unemployment and remote work allow more time for political organizing. The pandemic has kept people from most other social engagements while exposing many of the cracks in our society, from racism to the lack of a social safety net to the severe underfunding of public health and public education. But protest momentum is a hard thing to sustain, especially as states keep pushing the reopening of the economy. Will the People’s Bodega still be needed in a month?

Chloe emphasizes that it will remain in the struggle “until full abolition is achieved.” Currently, the group is planning for other forms of longevity as a mobile community center and food pantry. But part of their mission is to do everything they can to keep that protest momentum going. By providing food, water, and other necessities, the People’s Bodega is making the bar of entry to protesting as low as it can possibly be — you can show up without a mask, without sun protection, and hungry, and someone will take care of you. The food is fuel to keep you fighting.

Food media largely avoids the concept of “food as fuel.” I mean, is there anything so dreary? It evokes the unseasoned chicken breasts and steamed broccoli of gym rats, the calorie counting of diet culture, Soylent. In food media and “foodie” culture, food can and should be anything but fuel. It’s culture, it’s history, it’s a way to share tradition and heritage, it’s something to bond over, it’s a lens through which… well, you know the rest.

But for the People’s Bodega, food is fuel. That’s precisely its glory.

After the march passed, the van made its way to Washington Square Park. Later that day, police pepper-sprayed the crowd just as Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that the city “celebrates the Black, trans activists who built the movement and continue to lead today.” But before that, as the van arrived at the park, the marchers were still exuberant, many of them fortified by the sustenance provided by the People’s Bodega. A volunteer ran out for ice. Another offered to cart water around the park to those who may have missed the table. They apologized to marchers for running out of sports drinks, but displayed every Kind bar and box of raisins they had left. I watched as people bonded, sucking on Fruit by the Foot, comparing Dum Dum flavors, and feeding their friends and partners nuts and candy. The food may be fuel, but by the act of giving it away and the power of mutual aid, it is transformed. Here, a pack of peanuts is love. A Gatorade is solidarity. A free Kind bar is the sign that we’re all in this fight together.

In the following days, the People’s Bodega organizers restock and replan, coordinating donation pickups and Costco runs. They will be at the next march, electrolytes in hand, to fuel the revolution.

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Grabbing sustenance from the People’s Bodega | Jaya Saxena

The People’s Bodega is a traveling food and necessities pantry providing protesters with the fuel they need to keep going

Jaya Saxena

One of the vans

Jaya Saxena

But for the People’s Bodega, food is fuel. That’s precisely its glory.

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