Hi Marc and Ruth, Just realised that I missed your podcast invitation about *“News From Where We Are”*
At Telegraph Hill, South East London, we set up a Covid-19 Aid group to ensure that every household in our community has access to the food they need during the coronavirus outbreak. Our aim has been to provide boxes of nourishing food to those hit hardest by this crisis. We’ve been able to do so thanks to hundreds of local volunteers and £15k+ donations via Just Giving: https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/feedthehill?fbclid=IwAR0mmzAr0xqp7OLjyn4ylT2_6raqaNT3FT0A1B8xx0h0c_fLiMM0er-r544 Last week the Independent newspaper published an article where our Telegraph Hill group was mentioned through an interview as an example of more than 4,000 UK “mutual Aid” group: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-help-the-hungry-campaign-food-covid-19-mutual-aid-uk-a9453216.html A Goldsmiths University lecturer, Tom Trevatt, has made a short film of our project to promote the good work being done by mutual aid groups in UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSQEsxAcwUM. Graziano On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 19:04, Paul Hertz via NetBehaviour < netbehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > My wife and I have now spent over a month in social isolation in our house > in Chicago. We're fortunate to have a building with an apartment upstairs > and a storefront studio and small apartment downstairs. I work on new work > or print old work and archive it in the back apartment. We have a forest > preserve and tree-lined streets to walk in, and the grocery store offers > curbside pickup. My wife retired from nursing a few years ago, and I have > retired from teaching. In some ways we are quite cozy and secure, though we > miss seeing our granddaughters, who used to spend after school afternoons > with us. Now I read to them over video chat. > > Chicago is a hotspot for Covid-19 and yet we have been somewhat more > fortunate than other cities in the U.S., perhaps because the governor of > Illinois and the mayor of Chicago took prompt action. The mayor has become > a meme—images of her looking stern show up on Instagram > <https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whereslightfoot/>, superimposed > on public parks, restaurants, and porches. Inveterate news junkies, we are > daily aware of how desperate the situation is for some people. I am happy > to report that the city is making emergency funds available to undocumented > immigrants and the homeless, far more than the federal government has been > willing to do. The plight of prisoners in the county jail and stat prisons > however is very concerning, in this nation where incarceration is nearly as > popular as guns. > > I have been slow to engage with all the flurry of online art, though I did > attend parts of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, some of the Quarantine > Concerts <https://ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts> of the local > experimental music venues, and the Goodman Theater's production of School > Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play > <https://www.goodmantheatre.org/streamschoolgirls>. Domenico Dom Barra > kindly asked my participation for his White Page Gallery > <http://www.dombarra.art/whitepagegallery>, a project he has been > nurturing for some time. > > I said some time ago to a friend online that I was more concerned with the > slow accumulation of sorrow than with the immediate pangs of social > distancing. Anticipated grief erupts sometimes in unguarded moments when > emotion overwhelms me and just as quickly subsides, swift and ingenuous as > a child. I wonder if Boccaccio's young men and women celebrated their > freedom at the same time they held grief at bay. Did they confront a mix of > privilege and guilt, or were they just grateful for a respited from the > dire motion of the world around them, however brief? In the meantime, they > told stories. And so we do. And just as surely, the world is going to > return to us and we to it. > > Here in the U.S, we also confront a government led by an incompetent, who > boasted once that he could commit murder and the crowd would still love > him. People are dying because of his ignorance and narcissism. It remains > to be seen whether he and the party that supports him will be held to > account. This much is clear: a system of government that does not seek the > trust of all of its citizens, but plays at power games and propaganda to > divide them, is ill-prepared for crises on the order that humanity now > faces. The hierarchy of slow-moving disasters we locate under the rubric of > "climate change" are going to be much more massive than this pandemic. We > are all ill-prepared, but countries mired in convenient mythologies that > conceal brutal histories or devoted to authoritarian visions of social > order are especially vulnerable to reality. One handles reality by getting > real. Getting real as a society seems to me at least to mean not just > confronting the world crisis our very success as a species has brought > about, but engaging people in a new vision of democracy. > > And on we go, to lunch. A locus of universal agreement that we can still > arrange to suit our needs, if we be so fortunate. > > ciao, > > -- Paul > > > -- > ----- |(*,+,#,=)(#,=,*,+)(=,#,+,*)(+,*,=,#)| --- > http://paulhertz.net/ > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org > https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour >
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