Create some noise: Clap your hands, bang your pots, blow a whistle for workers on the front lines during the COVID-19 crisis
Fellow Princetonians:
I hope you are all well and finding creative ways to calm the stressors of COVID-19.
As the days turn into weeks and weeks into months, the realities of our human fragilities and susceptibility to this deadly coronavirus, for me, is sobering and humbling.
There are heroes among us – those at the front lines – nurses, doctors, hospital workers, support personnel, EMT crews and other first responders – police, firefighters and all those working without adequate personal protection and without critical medical supplies. And home health aides, grocery clerks, cashiers, gas station attendants and others who continue to work to serve our needs – and all those among us who are doing what is needed to be done despite the hardship of personal freedom restrictions.
Please join me in a community-wide celebration of gratitude. I will be on my porch every evening at 7PM to express my profound gratitude – clapping, banging pots, blowing a whistle, dancing, or singing.
I hope you will create some noise with me all throughout town to demonstrate our gratitude and appreciation for one another. Our small act of thanks just might be the catalyst to brighten someone’s day.
With kindest regards,
Kate Warren
Jefferson Road
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We should be grateful for all those who have the courage to go to jobs that can save lives in times like this.
We really should not be expressing gratitude that they have to do so without adequate personal protection and without critical medical supplies. We should not be grateful that they have to do this without hazard pay and without proper supplies. There is no excuse for the fact that our hospital systems do not have the equipment they needed and need given what they have been charging folks in our society. There is no excuse for unionized workers to be fired for asking for the basic supplies they need to go to work. There should be no gratitude for the slavery and greed that still exist in our system and for the incompetence that allows this kind of stuff to go on. There is no excuse for a feminism that pays teachers while asking women to work unpaid schooling their children at home, for a system that collects our taxes for educating our children and then asks us to do it at home unpaid. Everyone with children at home should have gotten checks just like the folks in Europe did weeks ago. Weeks ago. We should really ask ourselves why do our schools spend $32,000 per child and when can we get this money back to test real innovation in education? What if every person in Princeton got their $35,000 per child back and we started real community schooling, if we each got paid to educate our own? To really build community without corruption and control of big government, without the greed and incompetence of U.S. big capitalism etc.
The offhanded brutality of asking folks to go to work without adequate personal protection and without critical medical supplies … we should try to forgive this and really think on it, but is it really the thing we should be grateful for… So many things to be grateful for… Maybe this offhanded brutality of our system is not it…
I don’t think the front liners need noise. I think they need a living wage, health care and other human treatment. Best to give a substantial tip and advocate for universal health care.