The Corona Diaries: The time has come to organize

3/17/20 – 644 confirmed cases

Our dog Pinto and I have the sidewalks to ourselves on our morning run- no swerving around immigrant families, kids in their Frozen and Mario backpacks, making their way to PS 169. No adults marching down the hill to the R train at 45th St in their headphones and scarves. The lone crossing guard standing on the corner today looked very sad with nobody to help across the street.

The amount of new things that you would normally have to adapt to in a year has been compressed into 24 hours. Yesterday morning feels like an eon ago. People are getting out of the city and heading for the hills.  A co-worker is stuck in the Phillippines until this is over; another took an empty plane to Florida to ride things out.  My parents are wearing masks through Dulles airport as they make their way back to Vermont.

Classes for NYC’s 1.1 million public school kids, including Ediberto, were canceled Sunday night. Online classes start next week, although there’s a ton of kids with no internet access, so who knows how that will work. Kids who rely on getting food from school can pick up “grab and go” meals.

The Regents, NYC’s tests that are required to graduate high school, are likely not going to happen in June, but Ediberto agreed to spend this week doing Regents prep anyways.  I’m trying to give him some structure to hang his life around as this all unfurls. We spent an hour on the phone with my sister, Sarah, who is one of his English teachers, and she helped us come up with a plan for homeschooling this week.

Carlos and I are both working from home. I read a great piece that pointed out that when disabled people have asked to be able to work from home, or attend a conference or event remotely, they’ve been told that this wasn’t possible.  However, now that able-bodied people need these accommodations, we’ve moved heaven and earth overnight to make it happen.

My dog park friend has been laid off from his job working on lighting in the movie industry.  When I asked about unemployment benefits he scoffed at what $400 a week would cover.  When I said that I thought maybe our government could freeze mortgage payments as they’ve done in Italy and Spain, he responded “fat chance our ass hat of a government would do that here. They’ve never cared about people here.” He’s planning on working with his union to see how to support people.

Bars and restaurants have been shut down except for takeout.  Ediberto’s boss at his restaurant called yesterday to tell him not to come in this week, but he hasn’t been formally laid off yet.  We need to ask his lawyer if he would be able to access unemployment benefits.  Despite the fact that he pays into state and federal unemployment insurance, I think the answer is no because of the public charge rules that Trump put into place.  I think of all the delivery guys sitting at home with their ebikes, praying for this to be over quickly.

One of my bookkeeping clients is a cleaning cooperative predominantly owned by immigrant women whose income is mostly gone. Supporting them right now feels therapeutic to me. I’m encouraging them and all coops/ companies like them to try to apply fo the city’s loans and grants, and to set up fundraising campaigns on their websites.  Hopefully their clients and allies will support generously. My client is lucky that they don’t pay rent to the nonprofit that incubated them, but I know other coops and businesses and organizations are panicking about how to pay the rent on April 1. I’m still waiting for NYS to postpone the sales tax deadline on Friday.

I’m thinking about my one-time home of Nicaragua and low-income countries all over the world. There’s a saying that when the US sneezes, the world gets a cold, which is literally now more true now than ever.  As an example, I remember what the 2008 economic crisis looked like in the US- we millenials had just graduated with tons of student debt and had to move in with our parents because we couldn’t find jobs. That certainly was hard, but in Nicaragua, by contrast, because of the same crisis, my friend’s dog died of hunger because they had no money to feed it.

Right now, all the money that immigrants send home is drying up. Even when folks have money to send, they can’t get it there if the banks and Western Unions in the Nicaraguas of the world are closed. Someone I talked to yesterday mentioned the idea of having someone fly down to the Dominican Republic every week to disperse funds.  Between the fall in remittances, tourism, and trade, things are looking bleak.

Amongst all of this, in a blazing show of competence, Nicaragua’s dictator and his vice-president wife organized a “Love in the Times of Covid19” march on Saturday where thousands of government supporters marched together through the main streets of Managua.

Here in NYC, and across the world, the organizers are coming. Like an electric pulse running between neurons, the mutual aid networks have activated and are buzzing and growing as exponentially as the virus.  Occupy is far from dead- it’s saving lives.  On Saturday and Sunday I was on calls with over 100 people that made my head spin and my heart glow.  People are collecting funds for vulnerable workers (including sex workers and artists and freelancers), organizing their buildings and neighbors into “pods” to rally hyperlocal resources to provide for hyperlocal needs. People are looking for volunteers to keep a big Meals on Wheels program running. I’m starting to talk to someone about how to support people’s mental health through it all.  I’m hoping a fund will be set up specifically to support domestic workers and construction workers and immigrant street vendors and beyond. I’m hoping we can keep thinking about the people in detention, the homeless, and so many more. I’m praying that ICE stops their terror at least for a little while and lets us all focus on supporting each other.

This week I’m hoping to figure out how to get Ediberto insured and what would happen if he were hospitalized uninsured. I’m hoping to start organizing my building into a pod. I’m doing a lot of work to support my clients with crisis projections and planning, and get them fully set up remotely. I’m supporting Ediberto with homeschooling. I’m paying our dogwalker not to come.  I’m trying to have us all go kick a soccer ball around in the park every day, put dinner on the table, and support neighbors. I’m watching Trevor Noah and eating chocolate. I’m trying to write as much as I can.

Sending love and strength

(p.s if you want to be notified when there’s a new blog, enter your email where it says “Follow Blog by Email” down at the very bottom on the right)