Without rapid results, it is impossible to isolate new infections quickly enough to douse flare-ups before they grow. Slow diagnosis incapacitates contact tracing, which entails not only isolating those who test positive but also alerting the infected person’s contacts quickly so they can quarantine, too, and avoid exposing others to the virus unwittingly.
Right now, the professionals there indicated a four to eight day wait time.
Update: I read this today. I may read it with students as a way of discussing what the government can and can’t do.
Self-portrait in the West Philly trash. Someday I’m going to collect all of my photos of church signs into a book. Or someone already has and I should buy that book.
I went out for a walk this morning and it was clear that late last night there was a giant storm.
Branches are down, leaves are everywhere, and some of the big trees on the university campus fell.
This happened. It won’t be there tomorrow. But it happened.
This reminds me of the situation we’re in right now as white Americans. You can go to bed, with your windows closed or maybe your air conditioner on, and you can sleep right through it.
Then you wake up in the morning. And maybe you see the branches down. Maybe you see the leaves. Maybe you see the evidence of what’s occurred.
But you can also walk past it and say to yourself, something happened, but it had nothing to do with me. Nothing to worry about.
What white America needs to wake up to is the way in which we have built a world where we can do that, where we can go back inside, maybe shaking our heads, or thinking that might be tough to deal with. We can say, hey, let me go back to my normal life. Let me close my eyes to the changes that are happening out there.
I don’t even have to work that hard to pretend they have nothing to do with me.
I think this is some of my work as a teacher. To open eyes, to gently bring awareness, to make sure that the students see those who are living through that storm. To see their peers who can’t escape from that storm, the black students, the students of color, whose parents, grandparents, great grandparents, who have been living this storm every day.
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder, Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never Remember to have heard: man’s nature cannot carry The affliction nor the fear. (King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2)
And I need to make it possible for the kids who are living the storm to say this f—-g sucks. Period. And I need to make it so that no child can ignore it, or pretend it’s not happening, or think that it’s just a minor inconvenience. Or claim that words or deeds or social media posts don’t matter.
So the question that these two men, who are circling each other in the parking lot, are really arguing about, ultimately, is how do you get enough white Americans to care? What strikes me to the core in this video is that both of these men are right, and both of them are wrong. The truth is that we know Americans pay attention to violence. Had there been no fires, had there been no looting, no physical confrontations with the police, these stories of police protests right now would have garnered maybe a few minutes on the local news cycle, but we wouldn’t see the wall-to-wall coverage that we’re seeing every day.
The other truth is that, the truth that the 31-year-old is grappling with. It’s that that quote-unquote violence is going to be used as an excuse not to sympathize with black struggle. That the communities who are already suffering in the end are going to suffer more when this is all over with.
I was also thinking about David Remnick’s piece in the New Yorker, particularly the way he ends the piece by citing a Victor Hugo quote that Dr. King referenced in 1967:
“If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
