It wasn’t supposed to last this long….

Thursday 4/30/2020
I can remember sitting at my desk at work, two minutes away from an important conference call, and hearing that my kids’ schools were closing for 6 weeks. I was shocked and couldn’t imagine having them home that long. My oldest had left school early that day too. None of us realized it would be the last day of school. It’s almost comical to reflect on where my head was at that day. Here we are, past six weeks and our stay-at-home order is expected to be extended. The announcement is expected tomorrow.

Friday 5/1/2020
Happy May Day? Non-essential business will remain closed through the end of May until we enter “Phase Two” of re-opening our state economy. There are four phases, with three weeks at least between each phase.
This doesn’t alter very much from my current lifestyle. With my kids still doing online school through June 19th I’m not able to return to work full time anyway. I am sad for small businesses. Such as my brow salon. Thankfully they’ll still open, but there have been many businesses announcing their permanent closure every day.

Week Eight … Conditions are Getting Worse …

Thursday 05/07/2020
It was predicted that people would deny the virus was serious after our stay at home orders. We’ve flattened the curve so people think it was never a pandemic. “The Government is controlling us. They’re profiting from this closure.” I’m not an expert at anything involving politics, I get my news from social media articles. What I do know to be true is what I hear from my first-responder husband, and my ICU nurse friend. They don’t lie nor exaggerate. So I’ll keep wearing my mask in public and keep my distance from others. It doesn’t hurt me to do so.
The very serious issues at hand, are the stories from around our country of hate crimes toward people of Asian descent. As if any Asian appearing person in our country should be punished for the virus. Disgusting.
A security guard at a Dollar Tree store was shot and killed for asking a woman to wear a mask in the store. Somehow that was offensive enough for two men to return to the store and shoot him, defending her honor. This story is similar to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was dragged behind a truck and murdered for “offending a white woman” in 1955. To be clear, it’s 2020, 65 years later.
Today, if you Google “man running” they’ll complete your search to show headlines for Ahmaud Arbery, the black man shot while jogging in Georgia. He was followed in a truck by a white man and his son. Supposedly, he looked like a suspect who’d committed robberies in the area. So they follow him, confront him, he resists them, he’s shot by a shotgun at close range. He wasn’t wearing a hoodie, it was broad daylight, he was minding his own business exercising. He was murdered similarly to Trayvon Martin in 2012. Trayvon was also followed by a “good Samaritan” and subsequently killed in “self-defense”. As of this writing, the father and son who killed Ahmaud still have not been charged with any crimes.

What Have We Learned?

History apparently teaches us nothing. Humans are cruel and they always will be. Of course there are those who resist, who fight for change. I hope that one day we outnumber the cruel ones.