Items

• 
  05/02/2020

  A special day

  This photo was taken on my birthday, Saturday May 2nd, 2020, and it shows my cousin and I. This photo is really important to me because my cousin and I have became really close over time. We FaceTime everyday and we make many memories. She is one of my best friends and I love her very much. She is very funny and crazy, and I can’t ask for a better friend/cousin. We would sometimes come to each other’s house unexpectedly, and then spend the whole day together. She is always there for me, and I am always there for her.
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  2020-05-07

  My Lonely Street

• 
  05/06/2020

  Email exchange between my mother and I

  This is an email exchange between my mother in Randolph NJ and myself in Taylors, SC. My mother and I have a strained relationship and have only started to communicate again recently in light of the Coronavirus, the fear and uncertainty it has caused, tho I still do not speak with my father or brother. The strained nature of our relationship makes this read almost like a cross between a brief note and a newsletter of current events. It covers so many of the current pressing issues. My mother mentions the schools being closed, being unable to babysit for fear of the virus, fostering cats from the shelter because most animal shelters have closed or severely reduced their indoor kennels and seeking food for those animals from a pet food bank. She also references my son who is in a long term hospital and whom we have been unable to visit since the outbreak. In my reply I talk about being supported in our need for a substantial plumbing repair by our church community but needing patience because there are just so many people in need right now and express similar about our need to go to a food bank at the moment, stating that I want to make sure that people who really can't get food at the moment are able to and expressing fear that we could be exposed to the virus by interacting with the volunteers who are working on overburdened lines. Additionally I tell her that I have donated money to a local domestic violence agency in her name for Mother's day as they helped me years ago and are suffering from a lack of ability to fundraise at the moment. The entire exchange covers so many of the ways that our lives have changed and been affected by the pandemic.
• 
  2020-05-06

  Coronavirus causes wave of fake new

  The Coronavirus is just a new way for the media to badger President Donald Trump. First when Trump called it the Chinesevirus he was immediately attacked by media and was being portrayed as a racist for saying something that is simply true. Then he was asked many questions about that comment. The media is also claiming that the coronavirus attacks African American more then white people. The media should stop attacking Trump and scaring American citizens with FAKE NEWS. *Date as submitted: 11:16 AM 5/6/2020
• 2020-05-06

  COVID on the Border: Part 1

  I won’t name the town I was in due to operational security concerns but I arrived on 9 March 2020 to a small rural community on the U.S. side of the U.S./Mexican border. I had arrived in support of one of those governmental three-letter agencies and would be spending the next few weeks in the town. For a small town it had all the services necessary to fulfill the needs of myself and my coworkers; restaurants, grocery stores, even a shopping mall. Surrounded by farms, the town was predominately blue-collar and relied heavily on cross-border migrants to assist in the fields. Spanish was the dominant language and a great opportunity for me to recall my ad hoc lessons from junior high classmates while growing up in Long Beach, California. The gig was temporary but would be a new experience in a new location. I was excited. The first night in town I enjoyed a meal at a nearby Famous Daves BBQ restaurant with my coworkers. As we ate our BBQ sandwiches finished off with draught beer we couldn’t help but notice the concerns of news anchors on a nearby television over COVID’s proliferation in the U.S. Each day from that point on the restrictions grew. First barber shops, nail salons, and other non-essential businesses. Then restaurants. A week later the Famous Daves was closed for dine-in. Our world was collapsing. In a matter of a week the town’s fragile economy had come to a screeching halt. Nearby was a large shopping mall that I visited during my first few days in town. I bought a replacement wedding ring from the mall’s JCPenny after losing mine prior to the trip. Now the giant behemoth, that monument to 1980s-90s materialism, was closed. Not a soul stirred. A recreational jog around it found a family riding bicycles in the parking lot. Aside from a few lawn care workers pruning shrubs and palms it was a ghost town. I thought of the courteous saleswoman who helped me pick out the replacement ring; how was she fairing, what was her income like, what was her struggle like now? As these thoughts permeated my mind I couldn’t help but be thankful that I was still in a job that paid. I said a quick prayer for her. Could I help? The mall was locked tight, no way to find out who she was. In just a few weeks of living in this small town during this time of COVID and observing human responses and governmental orders related to the pandemic I was shocked to learn how fragile an economy can be. What did this look like for the future of businesses? Could that large mall ever open again or was it relegated to history, to serve as a relic or memorial to past human behaviors. Amazon had become king. One’s only hope was to live near an Amazon packing plant or own a business that was sub-contracted by the online giant. The farms continued to produce, the trucks continued to drive, but there was a hole in this once tight-knit small town along the border.
• 
  2020-05-05

  Six Feet

  This week I witnessed a screaming match between 2 customers at the store because one person did not remain exactly 6 feet away from them. It makes me wonder if when things return to "normal" if people will suddenly want to be friendly again.
• 
  05/06/2020

  Picking up litter on our neighborhood walks

  Photos of my partner and I picking up litter in our Taylors, SC neighborhood during our walk. We wear masks to go out and walk in the neighborhood no matter what but add gloves if we plan to pick up litter. It's hard to feel useful or any sense of control during this time. Doing this while we get out for a little exercise gives us a small feeling of control over our immediate environment and a sense that we are doing something positive for ourselves and our neighbors. It feels better than staying entirely isolated and feeling helpless in the face of all of this fear, grief and loss.
• 
  2020-04-03

  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston COVID Response

  On April 3rd, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston joined museums around the country when it announced it would furlough between 325 and 340 of its 750 employees as part of the MFA's strategy to mitigate financial losses caused by the coronavirus. In a guerilla art installation, Boston artist Peter Agoos placed a surgical mask over Antonio López García’s sculpture “Day,” which stands outside the museum.
• 
  2020-05-06

  Greenville, SC Chicken processing plant demonstrates failures of US infrastructure

  Two screenshots telling a story about the House of Raeford chicken processing plant less than a mile from my home and a larger story about the failure of the US infrastructure at this time. About 2 weeks ago we began to hear rumors that the meat supply was likely to be affected by the pandemic, workers were becoming sick in huge numbers and the processing plants were closing down. At the same time many of them were currently overloaded with products that they could not sell to restaurants and schools. 10 days ago the processing plant down the road held a huge sale on their overstock meat. Several thousand people lined up in their cars for miles down the road. They hung out in the parking lots of other businesses and moved in and out of them while waiting in the line. Very few people were masked ; none of the plant employees were masked. A few days after the sale President Trump declared meat packing plants essential for the economy and required them to stay open tho he provided no funds for PPE for workers nor any real guidelines on how to keep them safe. 7 days after the huge sale at the House of Raeford plant they reported positive cases amongst their workers. They refuse to say how many people are infected out of privacy concerns. At every step of the way the people involved should have been able to trust the government to keep us safe and we have not been able to. We should have been able to trust in our food supply or at least in the information we received about it so we didn't feel the need to panic buy food. The workers should have been protected from the start and definitely after they were ordered to work. We should be able to know what information to trust to make informed decisions regarding our lives and the lives of our fellow citizens. The US government is spectacularly failing to provide the least feeling of stability at this time.
• 
  2020-04-19

  A Neighborhood Unified Together

  During this pandemic it is important to stick together and lean on the people around us. This image captures neighbors coming together to support each other while maintaining social distancing.