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Are You Aware? Who Will Survive?
This is part V in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. So many of us are home with our families and are relatively safe and going out infrequently. Imagine if the situation were different. Imagine trying to survive in this time without a home. Many homeless people are afraid to go into shelters at this time. They fear the close quarters and the infection rates in the shelters. Earlier this month 94 men tested positive at a homeless shelter in Salt Lake City. Recently in the Boston area all residents and staff at certain homeless shelters were tested for COVID-19. At one of these…
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Are You Aware? Front Lines
This is part IV in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. My favorite toy as a 4-year-old was a little black doctor’s bag. It included an orange reflex hammer and a yellow-and-blue shot and stethoscope. I took a first-aid course my freshman year in high school and was chosen as one of six first responders for the junior high. Our advisor would call us out of class, then we’d triage the situation and get started on taking care of our patient. We’d fill our advisor in once he was able to get his class situated and come join us. We also served as the…
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Are You Aware? On the Street — Greater Love Hath No Man
This is part III in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. Are you an essential worker? I am. Every day I go out into the world to help you, my friends, to be able to remain safe. I am not a nurse like Kious Kelly, a 48-year-old assistant nurse manager at Mount Sinai West. This is the hospital in NYC where nurses wore trashbags because they did not have access to the recommended personal protective equipment (PPE). Kious Kelly died of COVID-19. I am not a doctor like Frank Gabrin who had texted a friend to report the lack of PPE in the emergency…
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Are You Aware? Homefront — In Our Response Lies Our Growth and Our Freedom
This is part II in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. According to Maslow, our three most important needs are physical need, for things such as air, food, and water; need for safety, such as feeling safe from danger, pain, or an uncertain future; and love and/or belonging, which includes the need to bond, feel loved, and have strong attachments with others. All these important needs are challenged by our present circumstances, as we each fight our individual battles on the homefront to help contain this coronavirus. In this war, many of the most important contributions will be made on the homefront. Each of…
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Are You Aware? We Are All Enlisted
This is part I in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here. I have been thinking about the words “We are all enlisted till the conflict is o’er.” As a pacifist, I am generally not a big fan of battle-themed songs, despite their stirring and jaunty tunes. But this one feels particularly relevant to the lives we are leading today, and as I have thought about the message, I can appreciate the value of metaphors that allow us to identify and “fight” the battles in our lives. If you are like me, you have been worried about a lot of people, and situations beyond our…
