Rise

Herb Alpert’s Rise (1979 instrumental) has been playing like an earworm ever since I attended this month’s virtual screening of his documentary, thanks to AARP Movies for Grown-Ups. (While I had reservations about joining an organization that sells insurance and opposes single-payer healthcare, decided to invest in “risk-free” aka cancel anytime AARP membership for access to publications and events; no age requirement unless one wants to purchase age-restricted insurance products.)  

“Herb Alpert Is…” feel-good film this year, like his melancholy yet uplifting music! So mesmerizing, check out his Smile and Wonderful World.  With mandatory mask wearing in public due to COVID-19 pandemic, it will be some time before we can hear live wind instruments like trumpet playing so recordings are good for now.

Herb’s now 85 years old, nearly didn’t recognize him with his beard.  Walking past his elementary school in Los Angeles, Herb shared that a teacher couldn’t decide whether to give him an A or B grade for reading, so she brought in another teacher for him to read, and the teacher told him he was a “B reader, at best.”  From that point on, Herb said, he became an introvert.  Fortunately, his school also offered music appreciation, and Herb chose the trumpet, which “spoke” for him.  When neighbors complained about his trumpet playing, his mother encouraged him to play louder (not considerate!).  Despite mean teachers, industry v. inferiority resolved in favor of competence for Herb.

“Herb Alpert Is…” a beautiful life review, with Herb’s resolution of Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development to achieve virtues beyond competence: fidelity, love, care and wisdom.  Like jazz, this documentary is non-linear, improv-like, meandering with moments of Herb’s reflective self-awareness, vulnerability and earnest striving for authenticity: playing trumpet in the Army, where he perceived other trumpeters playing “better” so he determined to find his “own” voice, inspired to capture sounds of Tijuana Brass after attending a bullfight while on vacation (identity v. confusion, though critics today might accuse him of cultural appropriation?); ignoring Sonny Bono’s advice to “get out of the business” (industry v. inferiority revisited); being rich and famous, but miserable in Beverly Hills (he becomes silent in this exploration, so respect his privacy; as an introvert, I view famous=miserable), ending his marriage then getting remarried and moving to Malibu (intimacy v. isolation); getting “stuck” and unable to play until a teacher in NY helps him re-establish playing his trumpet, knowing how to compensate for not speaking much by partnering with spokesperson in business, trusting his intuition in signing some of my favorite singer-songwriters (Carole King, Cat Stevens, Peter Frampton, Sting/The Police, etc.) to A&M Records, which he co-founded so artists would be treated better (generativity v. stagnation).

As an older adult, Herb pays it forward by generously giving to music appreciation/arts education (notably Music Mends Minds intergenerational support group to address cognitive issues in older adults), waking up each purposeful day to “listen to your soul” with creative expression in daily (almost spiritual) practice playing his trumpet or piano, painting and sculpting for a remarkable legacy (integrity v. despair) and sharing his life process (wisdom).  Arts=liberation, much needed in K-12 and beyond!

For at least his first half century, clean-cut Herb appeared almost like Certified Young Person Paul Rudd, and documentary wasn’t too keen presenting chronology other than wife #1 came before wife #2; each wife appeared in videos of his #1 hits: This Guy’s in Love with You (1968, rare use of his vocals! wife #1 appeared quite hilarious in heavy mascara) and Rise (co-written by his nephew Randy, notable for spouting only F-bomb in film). Documentary is just under two hours, and I wanted more time with Herb, who is easy on ears and eyes, and maybe ask what did he think about Rise being used in rape scene in General Hospital soap opera? Herb Alpert is such an endearing blast to the past, as my boomer uncle played his vinyl records; and I liked listening to Rise on the radio (though Andy Gibb was my heartthrob in 1979 during a time when Video Killed the Radio Star). 

Herb defined himself primarily as an introvert and artist, which is so refreshing in these politically correct times that would expect him to identify as son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.  As a MSW student required to take a diversity course, I was annoyed that an assignment required me to write about privilege and oppression based on identities of age, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion, mental and physical abilities, nationality, race/ethnicity,…but I could not select introversion that has defined my existence in a society that privileges extroversion?! 

As an introvert who values autonomy and solitude, I initially welcomed distancing and working remotely from home during COVID-19 pandemic...until my extroverted neighbors also were stuck at home blasting their music (not Herb Alpert) and interrupting my Zoom meetings.  With bars shutdown during stay home order, it’s like how Prohibition drove imbibing behaviors underground, as neighbors seemed to make their homes into bars with noisy guests carrying 6-packs and filling up recyclables bin with emptied cans/bottles of alcohol.

Pre-pandemic SF was crowded so welcomed news of recent exodus from SF, with whopping 96% year-on-year rise in housing inventory, thanks to remote work...but could this mean leaving behind mostly retired old people and people receiving government subsidies for basic needs (housing, SNAP, Medi-Cal, SSI, etc.) who contribute less tax? Society needs taxes to provide public services for the common good, and make government leaders accountable to resident taxpayers!

Anyway, my own school experience was like Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (1979) with thought control and dark sarcasm in the classroom.  Elementary school was my introduction to losing autonomy and forced assimilation into the ways of an institution – something alien to my free-range childhood at home (and I was spared daycare/preschool).  I hated age-segregation (as my tabula rasa peers simply were not as interesting as my parents/grandparents), imposed afternoon naps in kindergarten, authoritarian school bell ringing, rote memorizing, series of holiday celebrations (which shaped my preference for truth-seeking like de-colonizing Thanksgiving), etc.  I also became an introvert and autodidact, preferring the sound of silence found in the library where I could quietly explore my curiosity.  

“You tell me it's the institution

Well, you know you better free your mind instead”

--John Lennon & Paul McCartney, Revolution (1968)

Those formative years shaped my resistance to this day, always seeking home and community-based services (HCBS) options over institutions that impose hierarchical and regimented structures (mass control), squelching self-determination, creativity and uniqueness. Growing up in a tight-knit family and faith community, members took care of each other, so I never gave thought to institutional care.  When I began my career in investment management and personal trust administration serving high net worth clients (“banking very few, very well”), money bought everything needed to support aging in place. 

(As an intense 20-something-year-old, I yearned for a more challenging career than simply throwing money to solve problems, so switched to institutional trust focused on qualified retirement plans to benefit rank-and-file employees.  My encore career as gerontologist has been the most challenging, largely due to confronting ageism at all levels—individual, institutional, structural/systemic—and its harmful impacts on quality of life.) 

No elementary school library would be complete without libertarian socialist Nathan J. Robinson’s charming antifascist children’s book, Don’t Let the Pigeon Question the Rules: A Parody for Tyrannical Youngsters (2014), which promotes the law of conscience and critical thinking of alternatives (why it’s preferable to “befriend” v. “get” a puppy) than unquestioning obedience in servitude to officious authoritarian/totalitarian mortals.  Likewise, consider a return to New Deal economist John Maynard Keynes, who fought authoritarianism with economic policies to live the good life 😊, because the value of human life does not depend on economic productivity.   

“The moral obligation that we all have is to help sustain the life around us, and we hope that others will sustain us too when we are “feeble” and in need.

…In the United States, work is the point of life, rather than life being the point of work. In many European countries, leisure is taken very seriously indeed, and the purpose of working is so that we may have more of it (leisure)… Life is beautiful in and of itself, and I do not need the old folks to produce scholarly papers in order to care about keeping them alive.”—UK-born Nathan J. Robinson, “Animals Are Pointless, And We Should Be Too,” Current Affairs (Jan/Feb 2020) 

Long-term care (LTC)

As an introvert, I tend to approach work like a cultural anthropologist doing non/participant-observation.  I have worked in institutional LTC settings like adult day health care (ADHC), assisted living facility (ALF) and nursing homes (non-profit, public), so I regard them as hierarchical workplaces.  These LTC facilities operated on the assumption that imposing “structure” (routines) on the lives of retired older adults was somehow beneficial—yet more likely to benefit budgets and staff work schedules.  Thus, I also associate LTC facilities with the gnawing disaffection of my oppressive K-12 years that I would not want to repeat (try watching Groundhog Day every day).  Group travel tours are similar (“you’re on tour, not vacation!”) but manageable because they’re short-term.

While ADHC and nursing homes operate under the medical model (qualifying for Medicaid/Medicare funding) and infection control training was part of orientation, ALF are non-medical (private pay) and could benefit from training.  Medical or not, congregate LTC facilities all operate under economies of scale, mass production with little personalization, though some ALF try to market as luxury lodgings with nickel and dime fees for services. 

In my experience, ALF residents seemed to cope with institutional life (and their medical ailments) through alcohol consumption, cannabis (actually knew two residents who got wealthy from cannabis production enterprises!), and considering California’s End of Life Option Act (EOLOA).  Self-education important because California EOLOA contains conscience clause so health care provider has no liability for “refusing to inform a patient regarding his or her rights…and not referring an individual to a physician who participates” (see Deciding with dignity: The terminally ill patient's right to information about California EOLOA and Dale-Jablonowski v. University of California Board of Regents case dismissed). 

None of these coping mechanisms were available to residents at nursing homes that received federal funds because cannabis (Schedule 1 substance) and medical aid in dying remain illegal under federal law; alcohol abuse was non-existent due to interventions from interdisciplinary team concerned over interactions with drugs or fall risk.

At ADHC under Community Based Adult Services before COVID-19 pandemic, participants were required to stay on-site for at least 4 hours each day for reimbursement ($76 from Medi-Cal Managed Care, $90 from Veterans Affairs).  But this attendance requirement was never enforced and even I turned a blind-eye because participants were mostly showing up for specific services: health care (physical therapy exercises, monitoring of vitals, medication management, etc.), social services (as-needed care coordination, case management, counseling, etc.), and hot lunch (depending on menu).  Participants who stayed 4 hours mostly had cognitive impairment and seemed indifferent to activities with blasting music (holiday celebrations, coloring, puzzles, etc. reminiscent of kindergarten), and they did not leave early because ADHC was respite for their family caregivers.  One silver lining of COVID-19 pandemic has been allowing ADHC “without walls,” accelerating flexibility of reimbursement for services delivered in private homes…closer to On Lok’s Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) model that combines HCBS.

On Lok changed its tagline from “Experience matters in senior care” to “Where seniors embrace life.”  Though a partner to SF Reframing Aging campaign, On Lok ignored Reframing Aging Style sheet to change the language: “Say older people or older adults” based on research that these terms are perceived as “more capable than seniors.”  More substantively, unveiling this rebranding seemed to reinforce Old Lives Matter, during this COVID-19 pandemic.  Particularly in residential LTC facilities, fixation on older adults at risk has “othered” them as passive, dependent and vulnerable in a medical model that decided they should not be allowed to take certain risks like embracing life via social visits with precautionary measures in place, while allowing psychosocial risk of extended isolation to jeopardize their well-being and “will to live.”  It has been unsettling to learn about former clients/residents "deaths of despair” while being protected from COVID-19 risk. 

Blame Industrial Revolution’s compulsory mass education for age grading, and using age to organize the tripartite division of life course into schooling, work and retirement. I also resisted this age-segregated institutionalized life course, in favor of age-integration by mixing schooling, employment and retirement with all ages—especially older adults with stories to share. Now COVID-19 pandemic has blurred these boundaries with homeschooling, remote work, and leisure at home… with less age-segregation, perhaps another silver lining in this pandemic?

According to Pew Research, multigenerational households are back, mostly out of necessity:  A majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression. Intergenerational connections can help reduce ageism, and maybe return to family as informal support for LTC?

Nowhere to go, and all booked up

Attended Gerontological Society of America’s Age-Friendly University Special Interest Group Zoom meeting to get ideas as I develop curriculum to integrate aging content in MSW curriculum that engages students and promote more age-inclusiveness. Cool to see a couple of scholars (Rona Karasik, Nancy Kusmaul) who are included in my literature review on importance of student interaction with older adults, based on theories of social learning and intergroup contact to challenge ageism. To adapt to remote learning, contact includes exposure to older adults’ stories in films and books. 

10^th annual Legacy Film Festival on Aging scheduled this month did not take place, so I streamed several films listed in Professor Karasik’s article, Two Thumbs Up: Using Popular Films in Introductory Aging Courses; only a handful appeared deserving of thumbs up; and such a dearth of older women! My eyes really needed a break from the screen, so I turned to finding literature about older adults with emphasis on intergenerational relationships. When did I last read fiction as I have been so occupied listening to non-fiction experiences of clients/older adults and reading gerontology literature?

When asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I considered working in a library or publishing (but ultimately decided on careers that involved travel), so going to indulge here with books…

Reunited with Mills alum to join President Elizabeth Hillman (RBG doll on bookcase!), faculty (Elder in Residence Patricia St. Onge and Natalee Kehaulani Bauer, who are Natives) and students for discussion of Tommy Orange’s There There: A Novel (2018), a multigenerational story of Native Americans in Oakland. Native Peoples who relocated from reservations to urbanized ancestral lands found no there there—just a concrete place, like Gertrude Stein returning to her childhood home to find rural Oakland gone.  Older women (Opal cares for three great-nephews, Maxine is guardian) use the power of storytelling as antidotes to generational trauma (self-medicating to hide/forget with substance abuse and violence as legacy of colonial racism and genocide), offering hope/healing through multidimensional stories of resistance and renaissance (Alcatraz Island occupation) in contradiction to stereotypes…source of greater authenticity in searching for heritage and identity than googling “what does it mean to be a real Indian.” And the idea of home as spiritual community is powerful.

Mills College put up for sale works by dead white men: Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) sold for nearly $10 million, and handwritten score by Mozart (1770s).  Persimmon Tree, a quarterly magazine by women over age 60 and published in association with Mills College, paid tribute to RBG in its latest issue. 

Litquake co-founder Jane Ganahl (also writes about solo aging) hosted discussion with Amy Tan (Boomer) and Kevin Kwan (Gen X), who both wrote books made into films about filial piety in Chinese families, The Joy Luck Club (1989, 1993) and Crazy Rich Asians (2013, 2018).

During her Zoom appearance, Amy moved her head away from screen several times, so got peek at her craftsman house in Sausalito, with views of SF Bay and Angel Island.  After contracting Lyme disease over 20 years ago, Amy and her hubby made plans to build an all-accessible two-bedroom house to age in place, with elevator, roll-in showers, walk-in bathtubs, wide sliding doors, etc. designed to be functional and beautiful using African mahogany and Asian aesthetic. 

Where the Past Begins: The Life and Work of Amy Tan documentary for PBS was in progress by filmmaker James Redford, who died at age 58 from liver cancer this month. 

Rachel Khong moderated Good Things in Small Packages: Writing Short Stories at Litquake.  She wrote short stories, magazine article about her Po-Po (grandmother) who had Alzheimer’s, and then her first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin (2017), about a millennial who returns home to help care for her father, a retired history professor diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Probably should check out this novel before its film starring Constance Wu of Crazy Rich Asians.

Senior Planet’s Ryan Kawamoto hosted Ruth O. Saxton (ROS) Presents: Stories That Defy Expectations of Old Women.  Ryan introduced ROS as his classmate’s mother and Mills English Professor Emerita, recently retired after 46 years.  This spring she taught her final course with 15 Mills students and 30 Oakland Senior Center participants who were hungry for conversation beyond bingo and ballroom dancing activities.

Her latest, The Book of Old Ladies: Celebrating Women of a Certain Age in Fiction (2020), was a 20+ year project, begun at age 60 and interrupted by traumatic brain injury from a 2004 car accident.  To gather “examples of good aging,” ROS asked for recommendations, googled, hired students to look for stories, reviewed 100 stories before whittling to 31 stories organized in 5 chapters (Romancing the Past, Sex After Sixty, Altered Realities, It’s Never Too Late, and Defying Expectations).  After printing 800 copies, book sales going well so her book is being reprinted. (UK blogger Caroline Lodge maintains Older Women in Fiction Series.) 

ROS resisted “deathbed bookends,” or stories of a fictional older woman at her deathbed pining for unrequited romance of her youth, and challenged other stories of being a wife and mother as incompatible with career, citing her privileged position as white academic at an all-women’s college. (During this pandemic, women working in academia have struggled with demands of work and caregiving, with reduced productivity that could jeopardize their ability to get tenure—further exacerbating the gender gap where women represent 40% of tenured faculty…but perhaps this pattern is less so in an all-women’s college? ROS' daughter Kirsten T. Saxton, Mills '90, is also Mills Professor of English. Mills faculty can enroll children up to age 10 at Mills College Children's School on-campus.  In general, record numbers of women have dropped out of the workforce during pandemic, which has implications for their retirement security.) 

To combat ageism, ROS recommended: don’t let anyone tell you what you can’t do because you’re a certain age; have friends of all ages including your own cohort age; instead of young people limiting conversations with older people to nostalgia (“what was it like when you were little?”) talk about the present as well. 

SFSU Creative Writing Professor Carolina De Robertis (Mills MFA ’07) hosted super engaging chat with her former student, Jose Antonio Vargas (SFSU BA, Political Science, ’04),  about his memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018).  Jose’s grandparents made it possible for him to immigrate from Philippines to California, in pursuit of the American Dream.  At age 12, Jose separated from his mother in the Philippines to live with his grandparents in California after his Lolo (grandfather in Tagalog v. Hawaiian word for idiot) paid $4,500 to a smuggler.  However, after Jose came out gay as a teenager, Catholic Lolo rejected him viewing homosexuality as a sin and complicating plan for Jose to marry an American woman to gain citizenship (before gay marriages became legal).  

As Jose turned to school as his “second home,” he benefited from mentors like his high school principal and superintendent who connected him to a network (“underground railroad”) that financed his SFSU education, living expenses, driving lessons and obtaining a driver’s license so he could pursue journalism. Jose explained that if freedom for undocumented persons like himself doesn’t come from government reform, then it must come from the people you trust: “Surround yourself with people who will say yes to you, who will open windows when all those doors are being closed.  Your survival and your strength comes from that.”

Jose decided to become a journalist because if he was not supposed to be in USA because he didn’t have the right kind of papers, he would write his existence into America by publishing his name (byline) on paper! But this risky endeavor concerned Lolo, who expected Jose to work in unassuming low-paying jobs that undocumented people often take.  Instead, Jose shared a Pulitzer Prize with other writers at The Washington Post.

At age 30, Jose came out as undocumented in his “Outlaw” (2011) essay published in The New York Times, followed by Documented: A Film by an Undocumented American (2013).  Jose faced age discrimination, being “too old” for adoption as a teenager and being “measly one year” over age 30 limit to qualify for DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act. 

“No human being is illegal.”—Elie Wiesel 

Though Jose thought “life did not start until 40,” he started writing his memoir at age 36 because he was tired of lying (not talking about his mom in Philippines, except with his grandparents), “passing” (replacing his native Tagalog with PBS manner of speech), and hiding (affecting his own mental health).  Jose used his handwriting on book cover, re-writing narrative of being undocumented=not citizen.  He also called out hypocrisy: undocumented farmworkers who are essential workers, but not essential humans?

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-disparities-in-covid-19/

Public Service Announcement: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) have been dying disproportionately from COVID-19, including many immigrants making up the majority of essential workers who more likely interface with others and sometimes without adequate protections (like employers who fail to provide PPE to workers who care for sick/frail people).  Support Essential Worker Bill of Rights! 

Jose also directed White People (2015), interviewing white millennials for MTV documentary...would be great to see follow-up on Old White People! Or undocumented older people who are also “lying, passing, hiding” with no place to age? So important to hear oral histories of diverse older people to counter white-washed history. (Happy 51st anniversary, Ethnic Studies!) When I worked in ALF, residents decided to “cancel” Thanksgiving after empathizing with painful history of genocide from watching Great Courses Plus series on Native Peoples of North America.  If more people can act likewise to cancel Thanksgiving gatherings, no worries about spreading coronavirus! 

Carolina also shared The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (Oct. 2020), memoir and activist book by Alicia Schwartz Garza (SFSU MA Ethnic Studies ’17), co-founder of Black Lives Matter movement and organizer with National Domestic Workers Alliance.   

Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) hosted Shifting Ageism: How Consciousness Affects Our Experience of Aging. 

According to the history of ageism, older adults as knowledge keepers (storytellers) for the community began to lose their status when the printing press was introduced in 1440.  Yet, living older adults retain value with their oral histories (memories)—particularly if invited to dialogue.  Being genuinely curious enough to listen to older people about their lives and ideas have led to ideas about my own future, what really matters in life, adapting to and surviving challenges, etc.—how to become a more understanding person?

“Local” privilege

Attended Weaving Voices: Looking to Our Past for New Political Visions, which asked, “What kind of leadership do we need to take us out of COVID-19?” This Zoom meeting featured recorded oral histories of political leaders “to revisit the era of economic change from plantations to tourism, and political change with the return of AJAs and rise of the Democratic Party in the 1950s…sparking huge transformation.”  Following statehood, Hawaii Lt. Governors were Native Hawaiian-Chinese: James Kealoha (Republican 1959-1962), William Shaw Richardson (Democrat 1962-1966).

Included in the otherwise all-male lineup of politicians was Helene Hale (1918-2013), who represented Big Island of Hawaii, retiring at age 88 after suffering a stroke. 

Because my parents are aging in place in Hawaii, I pay attention to COVID-related news that might impact them.  I decided to postpone visiting them, especially frightful to learn how COVID passengers allowed to fly and/or die on flight. Hawaii government’s COVID response has been so frighteningly chaotic during its latest surge that U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams was dispatched to provide federal support for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing (after purge of incompetent state health and public safety officials placed on paid leave), and then Hawaii police arrested Adams for taking pictures in a public park! 

Anyway, this political visions program based on oral histories of long-dead politicians could have benefited from voices of living kupuna, preferably Native Hawaiian (like University of Hawaii Professor Emeritus Haunani-Kay Trask), “talk story” based on memories of this transition when Hawaii went from Republican (haole, Chinese) to Democrat (Japanese, Filipino) rule, political party identification stratified along race/ethnicity and social class; Hawaii stuck in Democratic Party groupthink (giving meaning to Ezra Klein’s claim that opposite of polarization is suppression, not consensus).  Sounds like Hawaii needs another transformation to get out of COVID!

“If the Republican Party gave us sugar, the Democrats gave us Waikiki.  If the Republican Party gave us racism, the Democrats gave us another form of racism.”—Haunani-Kay Trask, Centennial of the Overthrow (Jan. 17, 1993)

Two non-kupuna, non-Native, non-local panelists (one female, one male so at least there was some gender diversity!) alluded to current leadership challenges like lack of accountability in Democratic Party (“incumbency protection racket”), lack of transparency in Governor’s suspension of Sunshine laws that closed off public meetings/records during pandemic, less economic diversity from working class representatives like earlier politicians who grew up in plantations to be “more responsive to social welfare issues”, etc.

“Today, modern Hawai’i, like its colonial parent the United States, is a settler society. Our Native people and territories have been overrun by non-Natives, including Asians. Calling themselves “local,” the children of Asian settlers greatly outnumber us.  They claim Hawai’i as their own, denying indigenous history, their long collaboration in our continued dispossession, and the benefits therefrom.”—Haunani-Kay Trask, Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant” Hegemony: “Locals” in Hawai’i (2000) 

What I found noteworthy in program (but not highlighted by panelists, even after my question about plantation "no make waves" culture stifling progress was read during Q&A) was recording of State Senator John Ushijima (1959-1982) discuss how attending college in the mainland gave “locals” a different perspective from the prevailing “plantation mentality” and motivated them to seek change for “mobility.” Note current Hawaii Governor: “local” who never lived outside Hawaii for any substantial time to gain a different perspective, so he maintains status quo, like denying Medicaid to Micronesians and approving retroactive pay raises for unionized state workers despite growing budget deficit during pandemic.

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school

It’s a wonder I can think at all…

Everything looks worse in black and white…”

--Paul Simon, Kodachrome (1973)  

These are mere observations as I have no family history connected to plantations in Hawaii, which gave rise to “local” culture like mixed plate and Pidgin English, synthesizing disparate ethnic contributions to reinforce polarization of insider (“locals”) v. outsider (haoles, recent immigrants) and marginalization of Native Hawaiians seeking sovereignty.  Interracial people seem to identify with group based on appearance, like Barack Obama identifies as Black, though he was raised by haole mother and maternal grandparents. 

Generational trauma seems to keep Hawaii as provincial small-town: “Locals” size up people based on “eh, where you wen’ grad (high school),” fluency in Pidgin/Hawaiian Creole English (resistance against Standard English representing haole oppression), ethnicity, and tanned complexion.  Forget racial paradise myth: “locals” (as in Asian settlers, rather than Native) take care of their own tribe in plantation tradition of “divide and control,” rampant patronage, ethnic groups pitted against another (ethnicity-based pay differential, segregated housing), resulting in shabby treatment to Native Hawaiians and most recent immigrants – painfully apparent with Micronesians during this syndemic. Leave it to “locals”/their allies to praise their replication of racial capitalism/plantation village built on a floodplain for formerly homeless families that provide source of cheap labor (exploitation) to benefit nearby laundry business owned by former First Lady.  Is this indicative of leadership that will take “us” out of COVID-19? 

COVID-19 corner

Woo-hoo! Last week, SF became the 1^st Bay Area county and 1^st major city in California to rise to least-restrictive/minimal yellow tier for reopening during this COVID-19 pandemic.  Wonder how much being stuck at home to avoid smoke from wildfires helped?!

According to SF Department of Public Health (DPH) COVID-19 data tracker based on 681,211 test results reported to date: 12,399 positive cases and 148 deaths (64% male; 58% age 81+, 16% age 71-80, 14% age 61-70, or 88% of deaths age 60+; 38% Asian, 25% Latinx, 22% White, 6% Black; 1% homeless).  Total COVID-19 deaths: over 229K in U.S., over 1 million worldwide. 

SF has averaged 5,000 tests per day (exceeding goal of 1,800) and positive coronavirus test rate of 0.89.  Of the 20 most populous U.S. cities, SF has the lowest positivity rate and the lowest COVID-19 death rate. 

Yesterday, SF decided to pause further reopening next week due to uptick in SF’s key health indicators over last two weeks, COVID-19 cases (rise from 3 daily cases per 100,000 residents to 4 per 100,000, or 25% rise, signaling orange=moderate alert) and hospitalizations (rise from 23 to 37 patients, signaling red=high alert).  Data-driven SF DPH Director Grant Colfax reported other rises in COVID-19 cases, statewide and nationwide: 38% in California, 41% in U.S.; and since we don’t yet grasp the magnitude and potential duration of these increases, pause will help mitigate virus, adding “I wouldn’t be me unless I reminded you” to keep wearing masks, physically distance, wash your hands, avoid large groups, etc.    

According to CDC, self-reported engagement in COVID-19 mitigation behaviors (mask wearing, handwashing, physical distancing, crowd and restaurant avoidance, and cancellation of social activities) was highest among age 60+ (Boomers +) and lowest among age 18–29 group during April to June.  Whereas mask wearing increased over time, other reported mitigation behaviors decreased or remained unchanged. 

SF allows "shared spaces" for outdoor dining on sidewalks, so diners are unmasked while drinking booze and talking loudly—spewing respiratory droplets and aerosols further on passersby, practically forcing me to road facing traffic.  Unacceptable during this pandemic, so I called 311 to complain that outdoor dining should be in parklets, and my complaint was referred to SF DPH. Back in April, I emailed suggestion to SF COVID-19 Economic Recovery Task Force to adopt plexiglass partitions on dining tables as done in Hong Kong, which never shutdown dining during pandemic. 

While COVID-19 cases have increased, COVID-19 deaths appear flat mostly due to treatments learned six months after pandemic (that certainly benefited President Trump’s recovery from COVID-19).  In KZYX Coronavirus Update, Dr. Drew Colfax explained that physicians now know aggressive treatments for low oxygen level like use of ventilators may have been counterproductive; keep lungs dry instead of giving fluids that fill up lungs of COVID patients; rotate entire body regularly in prone position to increase oxygen; dexamethasone and remdesivir. This is reassuring news, unless one ends up with long-haul COVID, while we wait for vaccine/herd immunity. 

While adapting to New Normal, I miss hearing Dr. Drew Colfax’s earlier rants about how this COVID-19 pandemic was entirely preventable if there had been stronger national leadership.  This continues to be the case so worth repeating and ranting! It is unconscionable for government to fund corporate welfare, like $21 billion “no strings attached” COVID-19 relief to nursing homes (of which 70% are for-profit), without expectation to invest in resident care and safety of direct care staff.  Need to demand better because accountability and transparency is critical to take us out of COVID, restore public trust, and ensure survival of storytellers!