Lockdown Day 19

First, we were told to “shelter-in-place.”  I’ve done this twice before: once for an active shooter with unknown whereabouts; and once when I worked at the Wells Fargo Center, a building in Oakland that contained many businesses and was targeted for a protest.  So when I first heard “shelter-in-place,” I thought that was an unfortunate descriptor because it implies an imminent threat.  Now we have the more approachable “safer at home.”  Aaaaahhhhh, isn’t that better?

Well, there’s this mental health situation where people are either home alone with no physical contact for an unknown number of weeks, or are trapped at home with whoever else shares the place.  Are parents expected to both work from home and homeschool their brood?  Families who depend upon breakfast and lunch at schools, are they going hungry? Once upon a time in Oakland, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (“BPP”) started feeding hungry children before school.  At a church in January of 1969, the first Free Breakfast for School Children was served.  By 1975, the federal government permanently established it’s School Breakfast Program.  During those years in between, the federal government relentlessly sought to destroy the BPP.

4/4/2020 As of today, almost 400,000 people in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19, with about 114,000 of those in New York state. The US has far more than twice as many COVID-19 confirmed cases as any other country. Italy and Spain come in second with almost 125,000. Globally, more than 64,000 have died in this pandemic.