#newsamehope / 4.7.20
What is new in the last 24 hours?
The first COVID-19 related death at CCJ has occurred. This man had a $50,000 bail, and was effectively issued a death sentence while being held in detention pretrial.
A 16-year-old being held at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center has tested positive for COVID-19.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot has signed an executive order that gives refugees and immigrants, regardless of their citizenship status, access to city services that have been created to help Chicagoans deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Shame that we need an executive order to treat human beings like human beings though.
What is the same?
I don’t know any birdsongs. I heard a bird going “Ha-ha-ha-ha, Ha-ha-ha-ha” and it could have been a seagull? A raven? No clue. Time to learn. Larry, I’m looking at you.
The way humid air feels. It’s been a while since I’ve had exposure to warm, humid air. It will always remind me of the opening paragraph in Tuck Everlasting... “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.” Shout-out to all the Piven Conservatory students who indulge me by activating this text each summer.
What is the hope?
From the Chicago Community Bond Fund: “Today, a coalition of organizations from across the Chicago area are leading noise demos at three strategic locations, demanding action from our elected officials—including Governor JB Pritzker, Chief Judge Timothy Evans, Sheriff Tom Dart, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, and Midwest ICE Director Robert Guadian—to support the mass release of incarcerated people in the state of Illinois, helping to prevent the further spread of COVID-19.”
I spotted a controlled burn on Sunday. Small patches of prairie grassland, burned to get rid of overgrowth and invasive species (and from the smell of it, garbage). In high school, I used to go to the forest preserve on the weekends to cut down intruders like buckthorn trees and garlic mustard. The growth that would crop up in the wake of these controlled burns was exquisite. It was exciting to return to a site two years, three years after a burn, and to see the way native prairie plants fought their way back to the surface of the earth. What systems can we burn down? What old patterns of thinking can we eradicate? There’s this giant Q-tip-looking thing we would dip into “chemical” and press onto the stump of a buckthorn tree, protecting the prairie from its return. What systems of oppression can we smush a giant Q-tip onto?
Rebecca Solnit also wrote about soup in the context of hope. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that does make us best friends, right?
