I watch updates from the local, state, and federal government everyday. I am very impressed by our state and local leadership. Mayor London Breed recognized a deadly virus that was getting spread through the community via social interaction. She immediately called for a shelter in place in San Francisco, which put the rest of the Bay Area on notice. Days later, the state government called for a shelter in place as well. Governor Gavin Newsom is doing a great job, but the London Breed administration deserves so much credit.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff also made an amazing decision to close streets to cars in order to allow social distancing in neighborhoods with the goal to decrease car travel and give more space to residents. I hope this is a long term plan. Oakland is also planning to get rid of ‘beg buttons’ at street lights. This move is supposed to stop the spread of Covid-19. I alway thought those buttons were a breeding ground for germs. Good riddance, germs!
One of the things I do notice,is the coddling of the New York Governor. He acted far slower than we did here in California and that resulted in thousands of deaths. New York also has nearly five times as much foot traffic as we do and to see the lack of urgency from Governor Andrew Cuomo was appalling. One thing New York can do, and we’ve seen it historically done, is mobilize the police to protect social order. When social order is disrupted it leaves people confused and scrambling to get by. A city with millions of people should not be short on ventilators. If Governor Newsom can provide us with so many, why is New York slacking?
California, and the Bay Area, specifically, has made national news for the last four years. Immigration, human rights, public health, and housing have been what has made us the leader and the world’s 5th largest economy. Without the Bay Area there is no world’s 5th largest economy.
I live in an increasingly African American suburb of the Bay Area. Jobs here rely on the people who commute back to our town after their work day is done in San Francisco. That’s a drain on people. Covid-19 adds another dimension to the strain and stress on life. Don’t get me wrong. I love not riding BART one hundred miles a day to and from school. I love saving money. I love having time to try new foods. I love to live life without the physical demands of capitalism. I love waking up and not getting out of bed until noon everyday. Covid-19 has given us the opportunity to shape a new reality for ourselves and for the betterment of society. We now have the chance to create new communities after this emergency.
Our transit agencies can’t handle free bus rides everyday but ‘free bus friday’ should be a thing across the country. Hazard pay should already be given to us. Worker protections should be stricter. CEOs, in many cases, need to be fired or jailed and company boards need reforming. Low-wage jobs should not exist in this country. We should demand an end to the 40 hour work week and to invest heavily in our hospitals.
I firmly believe libraries should never be closed in a crisis. Libraries are tax- funded community centers and should be utilized to their maximum capacity in order to effectively serve the public. Food banks should have brick and mortar locations in low income communities. Americans should always receive money that is rightfully theirs. The disrespect this country continues to show to our farm workers should outrage everyone and it is our moral imperative to demand better for them. We need to demand an investment in affordable housing. Most importantly, we need to demand a better healthcare system for every single person in this country.
In addition to the realization of this pandemic, I have realized my place in the world as a millennial. I feel like I have lived through four decades in less than thirty years of life. Two of those four decades included an economic decline. How is my generation supposed to have anything? The people in charge are boomers who have had the luxury of enjoying nearly thirty years of economic expansion and do not realize that the bootstraps we’ve been told to pull up, have broken off.
My brother is not a millennial so his experience might be a little different than mine. He works at the local KFC two days a week and makes a little over minimum wage. He says business has declined.
My mom’s new reality is altered the most. As a baby boomer, her reality shaped the world we know today. Her generation was the beneficiary of every social program to ever exist in this country. She works three hours a day and gets paid for a full time job. She is very, very slow to learn that your job and a routine that has defined your life is no longer an asset in the greater scheme of things. All of it was made up to compensate for the lack of inaction by capitalists to do better by us. The systems they put in place were flawed from day one. I hope the coronavirus brings capitalism to its knees so that we can create a new normal that everyone can benefit from, regardless of race and economic status.
Speaking of baby boomers, our President is one, so is it safe to say baby boomers have no real grip on reality. From opposing new, affordable housing in neighborhoods, to responding to a global pandemic, baby boomers are taking us down with them and it is so unfair. They failed to deliver an equitable future for everyone else. They don’t see themselves as selfish after hoarding resources for themselves with no intent of sharing them with everyone else who has come after them.
I do believe we will get through this health crisis better than we went into it. However, our new reality must come with a set of non-negotiable demands in order to secure a stable future. The dropping out of Bernie Sanders from the presidential race was a huge blow to our future, but I have confidence in Joe Biden. Our future may now be in his hands.

Life before shelter-in-place orders, pre-COVID-19, seemed as if life itself was moving too fast. I remember feeling that there was not enough time in the day to get everything done. While my work and school schedules were butting heads, it felt like my senior year in college was breezing by. As a commuter student at Cal State East Bay, I would spend my mornings in traffic to make my 10 am classes, afternoons would be spent in the classroom or at the track for a run during my breaks in between classes, and after classes were done, I would spend many long evenings in the library to catch up on school work and reading just to wait out the traffic in order to have a smooth ride back home.
During my last semester at Cal State East Bay, I had the opportunity to be a part of the campus radio show “East Bay Live” that was run by Mr. Kevin Pina and the students. Beginning that week (Monday, March 2nd) I knew nothing about the coronavirus and did not think much of it or that it would even have a chance of spreading to the United States. That Tuesday (March 4th) before class, Mr. Pina showed us an email from CSUEB President Leroy Morishita about the possibility of the campus being closed and shut down due to COVID-19.
The following week CSUEB suspended in-person classes as of March 11th. After classes were moved online, things still did not sink in. It was not until one night for Dr. Cardaras’ Social Justice and Journalism class when we had to do research and watch a few videos about COVID-19 that something began to click. It was that night when I scared myself with the videos and things I learned about the virus.
The next morning, I woke up feeling weird. I felt nauseous. I had a knot in my stomach, still shocked, from what I watched. My mother had been dealing with a cold at the time. She could not shake it. I remember my mom being sick in mid-January, nothing out of the norm. A cold, some congestion, sniffles, and sneezing, which would later develop and turn into a cough. My mother was dealing with this cold she could not shake in January, which carried into the month February.
I work at a grocery store. After watching those videos about COVID, I was very afraid that I might have brought the coronavirus home to my mother. I began to worry that my mother was sick with the virus. I was nervous, scared, and anxious that this virus had already entered my home and gotten to my mother all because of me. My grandfather is a diabetic, who lives with me. He is a double amputee with congestive heart failure, which means he has water around his lungs. With my fear, I did want to risk the possibility of contracting the virus myself or being asymptomatic and bringing that to my grandfather because of his pre-existing conditions. I decided to resign from my job at Raley’s to protect my family’s health and mine.
Thankfully around the end of March, my mother was doing better and her symptoms began to fade away. This was after I brought home a vitamin C immunity boost from the grocery store for my parents and I. Not saying it was the cure, but I do believe the vitamin C immunity boost helped get rid of what my mother could not get rid of on her own. After that, I became calmer. Less anxiety. Less worry. Those frightening voices were put to rest. My mother feels like she might of a had a bad sinus infection, but who knows. All I know is I am thankful that my mother and family are doing fine and that is what is important.
The first three weeks of quarantine were not bad at all. In my opinion, the first couple of weeks went pretty smoothly because it was about finding things or tasks to do to keep me busy throughout the week. During the first week I decided to focus on the things I felt like I had no time for previously, which were my family, my hobbies, my school work and, most importantly, just re-adjusting to a new kind of living. I cleaned my room! Actually, I’m pretty good at keeping my room clean.  My parents have always loved that about me, but I had been wanting to change my room up and get rid of unused clothes for the longest time. This was the time for a total reset.
Before spring break, I chose to dedicate my time to my interests. Being at home I had the chance to now spend time on small side projects. I created a couple of mixes, curated some playlists and worked on some editing in Lightroom. It was a blast! The quarantine cranked open my creativity by removing all the clutter and distractions. It has helped me focus on other things I enjoy. I did take the spring break!
Coming back from spring break, however, I found it a bit more difficult to bounce back to my school work. I felt a lack of motivation to start my assignments. I did climb out of that slump and got back on the pony. This by far has been the most interesting school year of my life! I think that this time has made me fundamentally question what being productive really means.
Talking with a close cousin of mine the other night, we were saying that we have been fortunate that everyone we love has good health. We’ve been able to use this time to work on ourselves, to self-reflect and think about how we can come out of this period in history to be better human beings. In that sense, I think it has helped us completely shift what we see as what is most important and most valuable in life. With all this this time that we never have, we can work on ourselves, learn new skills, and strengthen our relationships with friends and family. That is what I would say are the most important aspects of life under quarantine.