Four Years of COVID

we are four years following COVID nineteen. So this week I had I will also have a conversation with our friend, doctor Jonathan Metzel about the fact that but four years ago, him and I began a conversation that we've been doing every week for the last four years, that him and I had started our work together at a time when we just didn't know what else to do, so we said, let's at least be in conversation, let's let least touch base once a week, and four years later, here we are.

But the reason why I want to use this woke Wednesday because I want to remind folks that wokeness right is about consciousness. It is about being aware of and conscious to the world around us. Right. Yes, as it pertains to systems, you know, interconnected systems of oppression, but in general, folks like, what the fuck is just going on?

How we are feeling right? That we are human beings that continue to just do instead of be and how we don't end up in a place of consistent repetition right of doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. Right is by sitting with ourselves, with each other, being in conversation and sharing what we

have learned from the experiences that we have had. Having time to reflect is an opportunity to think back on lessons learned, what you could or would have done differently, and how you will carry now this new knowledge into

the future. And what I realize on this week of this four year anniversary of the World Health Organization announcing that COVID nineteen was a pandemic and following that the world shutting down, is America has done with COVID what it's always done with points of trauma in this country forget about it, bury it, and pretend it didn't exist. And we wonder how we find ourselves in moments as it pertains to racism in this country, why we continue

to repeat the same things generation after generation. And it's because following the Civil War there were only twelve years of thoughtful reflection and repair that was done until the country once again sold out to the white racis in the South, ushered in Jim Crow, and buried any bit of progress that was made. Does that sound familiar because it's pretty much what happened following the first black president

for eight years. I think back to that time and it is hazy because of all of the despair and hatred and lies that we have been inundated with since, because the goal of white supremacists was to make sure that like we never thought about possibility in the same

way again as it attains to our politics. And so I think now as I am having my own personal reflections on what has changed shifted for for in my life and in our collective lives, and this lack of reflection of pause that we offer ourselves one on a regular basis right because we have to be productive for capitalism. We got to keep producing, got to keep hustling, got

to keep grinding. I'll rest when I'm dead. This obsessiveness around work and productivity is also a lie, and it doesn't blocks us and doesn't allow us the ability to have pause and reflection on where we were and where we are now and where we would like to be. And this is what Republicans' magism trump. Where they want us to be is in a place of tiffy, right, because in a place of ease, you have time to

think and reflect. In a place of tizzy, you're too busy seeing how they are stealing from you, how they are robbing you of your rights as well as your wages. So I want us this week to have conversations with our friends and family about how our lives are different now, how our thinking is different. Now. Have those conversations with people, because I don't want us to forget four years ago. And this is my personal reflection because so much in

my life was upended four years ago. I'm riding the train. It is March fifth or sixth of twenty twenty, and I'm headed in to go and record this very show. And I had received a phone call hours earlier from my dad telling me that my mom had had a major seizure. Now, my mother, my mother has epilepsy, but has been medicated for majority of my entire life so that she has normal brain waves and doesn't have epileptic episodes.

So when he's calling me to tell me that my mother had had a major seizure, I'm like what, And then he says, they found something. There's a math in our brain and they think it's a tumor. It was as if every single thing just went into just slow well, the sounds I couldn't hear, I couldn't see, like it just went dark for me. But I had a show to produce, a show to do, so I head into the city and by the time I had reached the studio,

I couldn't do it. I was an absolute mess. So I ended up leaving and I had it out to Long Island. What would happen over the next several the next week or so, because everything happened so quickly, I'd also left my marriage and had moved out on my own in January of twenty twenty. So it is now March and I'm two months living on my own and am now dealing with the fact that my mother has

a brain tumor. And in that time, this mysterious virus that you were hearing about on the news, one person has it, then ten forty one hundred thousands, and the numbers just keep ticking up. But I'm not really paying attention because my whole world is being broken apart by the news that my mother has to undergo brain surgery in a matter of days. When does that brain surgery

take place? March eleventh, twenty twenty. Let me just give a moment of gratitude and praise to the universe that my mother was able to get in and out of

surgery successfully before hospitals shut down. So I had been with her, sleeping in the hospital every single night until I left the hospital on March twelfth to go home and shower, to come back and be told that I can't enter the hospital, and I lost it on the security guard because my mother is upstairs recovering from brain surgery, and you're telling me this place that I had been sleeping in every night for the past week and a half or whatever it was, because time was a blur

that I can't return to. Thank God, my mother was a relief. And what would transpire over the next several months was my sister flying in from Vietnam, Vietnam shutting down in her not being able to go back, me leaving my home in Brooklyn, and my family being under one roof for the first time since I'd been in

high school, since I'd left for college. And while there are so many horrific things that occurred, the loss of life, the law, loss of society, the loss of connectedness, I can't express enough the gratitude that I have for the fact that while my mother was healing and while I was going through heartbreak, that my family was able to be together. It was the greatest gift. And I can say that understanding that I'm saying it from a place of privilege. My father lost his mother to COVID before

there was a vaccine. She caught it and within three weeks she was gone. So I'm not without the understanding of loss, But in that loss, I can also be so grateful for the time that I was given, that my family was given because we were able to work from home. My mother was just able to rest and heal knowing that her world, her family, was right in

front of her. So while the world was falling apart around us, while we had a fucking president that was telling people to inject bleach, to not do the basic thing of caring for your fucking neighbors, while we watched parking lots being turned into hospitals, food lines wrapped around for miles in places that I didn't even know had food begs, because that's how unstable our society had become. That's how big the economic disparities had become. People were

being laid off. My aunt was laid off, my younger cousin was laid off. And I think about this now, four years later, what would it have been like if we had had an actual leader? How much stronger would America have come out of this knowing that we could rely on our neighbors, that the masks that we were wearing weren't just about protecting ourselves, but they were about protecting the people that we love. Four years later, we

have people that believe that COVID was made up. Tell that to the people that have empty tables, empty chairs where loved ones used to sit. Tell that to the people who have blocked out of their memory in some neighborhoods. This smells because remember, there wasn't enough room in the morgues, so we were housing bodies in refrigerated trucks. That people couldn't gather for funerals to say goodbye to their loved ones,

So they held funerals over zoom. Folks, it is not just about remembering the washing of cardboard and just the shortage of toilet paper because people were so fucking greedy, right, and gouging of prices, But there was so much humanity, and had we had a leader that was actually steeped in empathy and compassion and was human himself, how hard COVID was would have been made easier knowing that someone cared.

I can remember sitting with my family every day and I'm going to say something controversial now, knowing what we know, But if not for the governor of New York at that time, just those press conferences and the regular check ins and the reminder to care for one another, I don't care at this moment. I just remember, like at this moment, what we learned after the fact. But I'm talking about how I felt in the moment that governor did what the President of the United States was not doing.

There were people that were in other states. He was being broadcasted around the country because Donald Trump was failing us. I don't want to forget this moment that forever changed our lives, forever changed the way that we work, the way that we connect, the groundedness that we once had. That stuff like a global health pandemic you know happens before vaccines in during the black plague, or happens in

the movies, like an outbreak and contagion. What we lived through for those of us who did make it is extraordinary, and we do those that did not make it, or those that are forever traumatized, those that are living with long COVID, we do them a disservice by not honoring their memory and honoring the way that our lives have been changed. What we experienced and continue to experience because of that time matters. It matters that we talk about it.

It matters that we go back and look at photographs and videos. It matters that we remember who were in our pods and why we chose the pods that we did. Are we still talking to those people and connecting with those people? Are we asking each other how we really are? Because four years in this country have been so fucking stressful and crazy. But if you're listening to this and watching this video, you are still here and that is

worth honoring, That is worth giving gratitude for. If you are a prayerful person, that is worth a prayer, a meditation, a moment of silence. If Donald Trump and MAGA had not politicized to a sickening degree this catastrophic time in our lives, we would have memoriams, we would have a

day of remembrance. We would be reflecting because over a million people lost their lives, and the president at the time, whose body count was at half a million by the time he left office, knowing that it was airborne, knowing how fucking dangerous it was back in December twenty nineteen, but did nothing but exacerbate a crisis. Is a fucking murderer on top of everything else he's already been charged with because he'll never be charged for the deaths regarding COVID,

we don't even talk about it. As it was his responsibility to keep American safe. He had people turn on science, on doctors, People were protesting at hospitals. The very people who were risking their lives, from the doctors to the nurses, to the administrator, to the janitors to the lunch workers, were risking their lives and being protested against because of Donald Trump. So when you think be your friends that

you can't possibly stomach voting for Biden. I want you to remember where we were four years ago, and remember where we could be right now. Had we not given Donald Trump an inch when he came down that fucking escalator, and had we told him to go to Hell, which is exactly where he fucking belongs, how different our lives would be now without the stain, the virus of Trump is that still has this country in its grips, the

world in its grips. But I ask you this week to reflect, to journal, to think, to walk, to be in conversation with those that you love about what they remember about this time, how COVID changed our lives, Remember the good as well as the bad, and remember to hold space for one another because community is the most important thing that we lost, that we reshaped, that we reimagined and are still trying to regain. That is it for me today, Dear friends, on woke a f as

always Power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.