Yesterday, Gavin Newsom officially lifted the indoors mask mandate in California for most situations, marking probably the largest checkpoint in defeating COVID here. Just a few weeks before the CDC updated its recommendations that vaccinated people do not need to wear masks inside and outside, and many states updated their regulations in suit, considering the massively successful effort to vaccinate America in the past few months. With things returning back to the way they were before the pandemic and all of the cautions around it, California and America in general is shifting its focus, politically and media wise away from COVID. Though it's still majorly affecting other countries like India, which now is experiencing a new mutation of the virus called the Delta variant, the end of the quarantine is seemingly marking the end of the virus here: whether that is a safe approach will be determined in the future, but for now in the eyes of the public and the politicians, COVID is a thing of the past. Every restaurant I've been to in the past month has been full, nobody is social distancing when I walk on the street, and I'm also not being cautious after my second vaccination three or four weeks ago. Even my grandparents nursing home allowed me to be maskless, after more than a year of allowing zero visits. At this pivot away from the virus that America is taking, I think this blog will start to cover newer and less popular (more interesting) global issues, as the virus has been so ingrained in our lives over the past year that all of its stigmas and connotations have been talked about to death, and at the least I am tired of hearing the words coronavirus, masks, and everything else associated with this plague. That isn't to say I or the rest of America should push away the virus, as it has had such a massive impact and could easily come back in the future, as it's constantly mutating. Just like other modern phenomena, no one really knows what the effects of having had COVID will do to people, so a lot of people might have to grapple with its long term health effects, like irreversible lung damage, which could seriously impact its survivors in the future. Like how millions of smokers smoked before the research that cigarettes could be very harmful, and yet many people still smoke, people who were less cautious and more blaise who caught COVID might have more to deal with in the future than they accounted for. The lessons of the pandemic are still culminating, millions of people are still in lockdown, billions are unvaccinated, and millions more denied it ever happened, the world has a lot of healing to do and America specifically needs to realize that independence isn't always for the greater good, as individuality has both hurt the needs of millions of people and has been hurt by the chasms COVID caused for so many families and communities. June 15 is here: Everything changing in California's grand reopening Apple Store opening in Downtown LA
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Grant Projects - Milo Woods Self Help Graphics & Art Youth Committee Housing Rights Video Project5/13/2021 Today I attended the final GIP capstone event for Milo Woods who requested a grant to subsidize the production of a four-part video series focused on the gentrification and displacement of East Los Angeles residents. The event included Milo speaking about his goals for the grant, which were to "raise awareness for housing rights and promote anti-displacement advocacy through oral histories and film making," and he invited Self Help Graphics Committee members like Natalie Godinez to speak with on the project. Milo had been working on his project since junior year which he began with a fellowship with the inaugural Self Help Graphics Youth Committee, and he clearly is very passionate about gentrification and displacement in East L.A., which is an issue I can connect with because I live close to East L.A and have studied issues with L.A. housing in the past. The committee primarily supports Latinx artists and you can find some of their infographics on this page: https://www.instagram.com/shg1970/?hl=en. I'll be excited to watch the final video series in June.
Today I attended three different grant proposals, Laila Ward’s indigenous language mapping project for CIELO, Jackson Stimmler and Juliette Hawley’s SANAH project for Miry’s List, and Maggie Grether and Katie Huntsman’s librito series and cancer screening on behalf of the Lily Project. All three of them received most of the funding they requested and clearly were very passionate about their projects. Some takeaways from the event were the level of connectedness that every group had with their organization and how involved they were with getting their funding to follow the path they wanted. Laila talked about her CIELO mentors, Odilia and Luis, and how impactful she believed her project would be on the recognition of Latinx indigenous peoples by creating a geographical Information Systems map that would trace Latinx Indigenous people across the U.S. with the funding she secured. Jackson and Juliette covered how their project and collaboration with the SANAH project would benefit new Americans by providing them laptops. Lastly, Maggie and Katie talked about how their project with the Lily Project would
With the pandemic seemingly ramping down in most parts of America (unlike in much of the rest of the world), people have begun to gather and go about their lives much more similarly to how they were pre-pandemic. With this "return to normalcy," March has seen more than thirty mass shootings already, with some warranting massive media coverage like the Atlanta spa shootings and the Boulder shooting. Though the intentions of the shooters are often completely different, it is clear that the trend of mass shootings is rising again after a year of relative quietness and different issues which still plague American society today. It seems like these events are becoming less and less random, as after major shootings like the Mandalay Bay Massacre and the Charleston church shooting, extremely deranged people see an opportunity in extreme violence to propel themselves and their message into the spotlight of American conversation. The martyrdom nature of these shootings coupled with the ease of accessing weapons capable of killing masses of people show that America has a serious issue at its hands, and it will be important for politicians to keep addressing and actually take action in the coming months. I would expect that as we keep going back to pre-pandemic society, mass shootings will continue to be prevalent until real change is enacted. From a global perspective, it is damaging to the U.S.'s reputation and safety if we continue to be passive to dealing with mass shootings, and I think people will be more and more hesitant to engage in public, an irrational fear or not, because of the risk of experiencing one of these random shootings.
Mass shootings so far in 2021 (January to May) Read about the trip here: polygipvietnamcambodia.blogspot.com/
The difference between Saigon and Phnom Penh was immediately noticeable from the air. Above the city, I noticed the many rusted and blue roofs, signifying the mass of amount of poverty in Cambodia shining even in its capital city. After we touched down, walking out from the plane down into the airport felt very strange with the sudden change in temperature and the dirty ground. After waiting a long time for our visas, we finally made it out of the small airport and into a relatively large bus, just like the one we used in Vietnam. The bus ride took about an hour and felt like it took two. While we drove, the despair situation for many Cambodians stuck out like a sore thumb. The city was littered with construction cites, all displaying grand plans and sketches of what the future might look like with their modern compounds, if they were ever to be made. It felt like only one out of the many, many cites had any progress done at all, asides from being an empty lot full of Chinese funded cranes. About half way through the ride, it started to rain and we had also reached the middle of the busy city. Throughout our drive, luxury car dealerships also seemed to be very common, despite the lack of money twirled into modern Cambodian culture. Maybe the dealerships were only for the mass of corrupt government officials, but something did not seem right. Aside from the many stray dogs and carts driven by children, the most startling scene was of a man, dressed in a nice suit, in front of a large bank, spraying his new pickup truck with gallons of water from a green hose, as giant droplets of water fell from the skies in large quantities onto his new car. Maybe it was his smile, but to see the pure ludicrousness of the situation was very startling for me in our well air-conditioned bus. |
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May 2022
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