Links: Remembering and organizing

[sonia]

Influenza in 1918: Recollections of the Epidemic in Philadelphia by Isaac Starr, MD. This essay first appeared in Annals of Internal Medicine in 1976.

When the great influenza epidemic struck Philadelphia in 1918, the author was just starting his third year at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. After a single lecture on influenza, classes for the third and fourth year students were suspended while he and his mates manned an emergency hospital, in which they worked under little or no medical supervision and in the presence of an alarming patient mortality. This essay describes what happened in the hospital, and in the city as a whole, during the pandemic.

The Messy Truth About Carbon Footprints by Sami Grover.

Whether we’re biking to work or reducing our meat intake, skipping flights or buying green power, our lifestyle choices should be viewed as acts of strategic mass mobilization. And they should be considered as one part of a broader toolbox of tactics that also includes advocacy, organizing, and protest.

Mijente. "Join Mijente in the fearless fight for Latinx rights, justice, and radical change." My parents grew up in Chile and my mother was born there. I was born in the US and grew up speaking Spanish at home. Still trying to decide if I'm Latinx enough to join. On reading further, I'll just donate. I don't need membership in a private facebook group, or a t-shirt.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Identity is an interesting and complex thing, innit? Being the child of immigrants from Jamaica I am definitley Black but don't feel I am *African-American*, culturally.

[sonia]

Yeah, being the child of immigrants means being in-between a lot of things. I bet it's even more complicated when people shove you at an identity based on your appearance.

I want to think more about belonging vs. identity. I tend to think about belonging, which is all about the people and places around me, but identity feels like it's more inside me and maybe I have more traction with that.

[asakiyume]

"There is good reason to believe that a future epidemic could be handled much more effectively than was the last. The possibilities of prevention inherent in the new vaccines I am incompetent to judge. " --at the end of the article you linked to. Makes me feel very sad, because we have a vaccine, and better medical interventions, and this illness is less deadly, and still we've lost more people to it. (It's true our population is three times larger than it was, so in terms of percentage of the population, it's much less, but in terms of absolute loss and people grieving, it's the same.)

I didn't know that you grew up speaking Spanish! Did you visit Chile in your childhood?

[sonia]

I agree, the way the US has collectively handled this pandemic is heart-rending. We know better, and we have the resources to do better, and we just haven't.

I visited Chile with my parents when I was one and a half (don't remember) and 21, which was great. They didn't visit between those times because my mom was worried about being able to get back out with the regime there, even as a naturalized US citizen, since she was born there. My parents continued visiting fairly regularly after that, pre-Covid. They like to travel.