Covid 19 Strikes the Windy City

In January 2020 the television news reported that at least one individual has tested positive for the Coronavirus in the western suburbs. The Individual traveled from the region that at the time was a hotspot for the virus. Wuhan China is the location the traveler came from. Pictures being shown on the evening news showed us images of the barren streets of the far away Wuhan, China. In the next few weeks, the news began to report more and more about the Coronavirus until one day a few months after the initial report I was riding with my Father to the store and he says to me" You know they closed all of the schools in Michigan." I was not aware of the dramatic measures taken by that state at the time but when I turned on the television later it seemed the infection had made significant progress in the eyes of the lawmakers and things were changing in real-time. Day to day life would be affected in short order after I received the information about the schools in Michigan. The next gigantic indicator of how serious things where getting is that the president and Congress created a stimulus package to distribute money to ALL Americans.

Whoa !! This was unprecedented, the Government passing out money to everyone who is a citizen of the U.S. in order to create commerce during a time when commercial business was being asked to shut down. In a city like Chicago with its 50% unemployment for its Black population. To ask people who are accustomed to making ends meet by hook or by crook, now have to navigate a landscape in which people are ordered to stay at home. How do you hustle when you cannot move? It is now April and Chicago has had the steepest spike in new infections in the country. Cook County Jail one of the largest single-site correctional facilities with aprox. 3000-5000 inmates on any given day, has been invaded by the contagion. The implications are alarming for people being held in the tightly packed spaces for hours on end now have a virus being spread among them. A killer who is unafraid of the courts who takes the old and infirm without consequence. Efforts are being made to release those people charged with low-level offenses and find locations for home monitoring for others. Courts are now having hearings for people who have committed serious crimes that want to be released due to the virus sweeping through the jails. Robert Kelly aka R Kelly who is being held in federal custody asked the courts to release him due to the Coronavirus and he was quickly denied. Bill Cosby is another celebrity who has asked for consideration for release recently and has also been denied. Many people in custody on all levels will have to face this head-on, let us pray for them.
 I have heard several different accounts of how people speculate this so-called novel-virus came to be. Everything from it being created in China a weapon to some type of secret military games that included a contest of germ warfare agents where one of the contestants broke confinement and spread quickly throughout Wuhan, China. Whatever it's beginning it is now present in the lives of the American general public. We are in the early stages of the pandemic and our lives have all been shifted in a direction none of us expected. A sector of society where black Americans are traditionally underserved is education and now that schools are closed many school districts have started remote classes when that is possible. In a demographic where Black Americans find themselves at the bottom of the equation not enough of the students who are served by Chicago Public Schools has access to Wi-Fi and /or a computer, so remote instruction is a challenge. The effort is being made by CPS to accommodate students with devices to connect to the internet in order to take part in remote learning programs. In the midst of a global pandemic, administrators are scrambling to come up with solutions. I think it is a noble gesture to give students devices to connect to the internet in hopes that they will take part in some model of remote class instruction so let us hope students will benefit from the generosity and quick thinking on behalf of CPS. An educator who instructs at the highest level for major universities in California confided in me that she believes we are seeing the face of education change and that it will never be the same after the smoke settles. Institutions will adapt to change by force now and during the smoothing, out process will most likely see that brick and mortar schools are a costly burden that they will want to shed in order to take advantage of the efficiency and elegance of computer-aided remote instruction. This will be another way that technology will remove people from the workforce in the information age or the age of automation.
Its been suggested that the move towards widespread automation will push the divide between the haves and have nots towards and unbearable margin and spur public unrest that will provide a motive for the people to dissolve by force the fascist capitalist government we have overseeing our lives today. 

Technology has made leaps and bounds in the last decade in moving towards artificial intelligence and we are at the cusp of automation replacing an estimated 47% of the American workforce. This number was derived by Oxford University in the study they did to evaluate how automation will impact the American workforce. Women and especially women of color will be replaced en masse due to the type of work they do. Cashiers, telemarketers, customer service reps, and banking all have heavy representation by women and have been slowly seeing automation push people out of the workforce will now move in double time into the automated models that have been trickling into the superstructure of the American infrastructure. How will people survive this type of unemployment? The 6.6 million claims filed last week set a record going back to 1967, when the Labor Department’s data series began.“ This is a catastrophe,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), vice chairman of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, in a statement. “Nearly 17 million Americans have lost their jobs and they likely won’t find another one until the contagion is under control — and that may be a long way off.” On CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Chicago's Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Chicago’s economy can’t reopen until there’s more widespread testing and decried the disproportionate number of African American deaths from coronavirus, saying the disease is "devastating our community.” Nearly 70% of the city’s COVID-19 deaths have been African Americans, who make up only about 30% of Chicago’s total population. The fact that the Black community in Chicago is being hit harder than others is not anything new it was said back in the 60's or 70's that if America gets a cold the Black American gets the flu. So here we stand, a city of nearly 3 million people asked to stay in the house, businesses shut down, schools closed and people dealing with life as it comes. In a city that has one of the highest death tolls from violent crime struck by a virus that is complicating an already challenging place to live. You have to strong and courageous to live on the south or west side of Chicago. Danger is footsteps away and around every corner, in many communities, we live in here in Chicago. We will see this attack by an unseen enemy burn its way through the city, state and country and endure whatever constraints placed upon us but let us do this with vigilance and when its necessary aid one another in the spirit of community as we have done since being delivered here as chattel in the 15th century. As the diaspora has survived all of the atrocity and inhumane behavior presented to us and again we shall prove to be resilient and strong. We shall overcome, One love beloved.