Speaker 1: Good morning, peepsend Welcome to wok F Daily with Me
Speaker 1: your Girl, Danielle Moody recording from the Home Bunker. Folks,
Speaker 1: on this book Wednesday, I actually want to do a
Speaker 1: bit of reflection and I am going to use today's
Speaker 1: episode to really have us do what mainstream media and
Speaker 1: sadly this administration hasn't done since it came into office,
Speaker 1: which is offer up a really deep reflection on where
Speaker 1: we are four years following COVID nineteen. So this week
Speaker 1: I had I will also have a conversation with our friend,
Speaker 1: doctor Jonathan Metzel about the fact that but four years ago,
Speaker 1: him and I began a conversation that we've been doing
Speaker 1: every week for the last four years, that him and
Speaker 1: I had started our work together at a time when
Speaker 1: we just didn't know what else to do, so we said,
Speaker 1: let's at least be in conversation, let's let least touch
Speaker 1: base once a week, and four years later, here we are.
Speaker 1: But the reason why I want to use this woke
Speaker 1: Wednesday because I want to remind folks that wokeness right
Speaker 1: is about consciousness. It is about being aware of and
Speaker 1: conscious to the world around us. Right. Yes, as it
Speaker 1: pertains to systems, you know, interconnected systems of oppression, but
Speaker 1: in general, folks like, what the fuck is just going on?
Speaker 1: How we are feeling right? That we are human beings
Speaker 1: that continue to just do instead of be and how
Speaker 1: we don't end up in a place of consistent repetition
Speaker 1: right of doing the same things over and over again
Speaker 1: and expecting a different result. Right is by sitting with ourselves,
Speaker 1: with each other, being in conversation and sharing what we
Speaker 1: have learned from the experiences that we have had. Having
Speaker 1: time to reflect is an opportunity to think back on
Speaker 1: lessons learned, what you could or would have done differently,
Speaker 1: and how you will carry now this new knowledge into
Speaker 1: the future. And what I realize on this week of
Speaker 1: this four year anniversary of the World Health Organization announcing
Speaker 1: that COVID nineteen was a pandemic and following that the
Speaker 1: world shutting down, is America has done with COVID what
Speaker 1: it's always done with points of trauma in this country
Speaker 1: forget about it, bury it, and pretend it didn't exist.
Speaker 1: And we wonder how we find ourselves in moments as
Speaker 1: it pertains to racism in this country, why we continue
Speaker 1: to repeat the same things generation after generation. And it's
Speaker 1: because following the Civil War there were only twelve years
Speaker 1: of thoughtful reflection and repair that was done until the
Speaker 1: country once again sold out to the white racis in
Speaker 1: the South, ushered in Jim Crow, and buried any bit
Speaker 1: of progress that was made. Does that sound familiar because
Speaker 1: it's pretty much what happened following the first black president
Speaker 1: for eight years. I think back to that time and
Speaker 1: it is hazy because of all of the despair and
Speaker 1: hatred and lies that we have been inundated with since,
Speaker 1: because the goal of white supremacists was to make sure
Speaker 1: that like we never thought about possibility in the same
Speaker 1: way again as it attains to our politics. And so
Speaker 1: I think now as I am having my own personal
Speaker 1: reflections on what has changed shifted for for in my
Speaker 1: life and in our collective lives, and this lack of
Speaker 1: reflection of pause that we offer ourselves one on a
Speaker 1: regular basis right because we have to be productive for capitalism.
Speaker 1: We got to keep producing, got to keep hustling, got
Speaker 1: to keep grinding. I'll rest when I'm dead. This obsessiveness
Speaker 1: around work and productivity is also a lie, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't blocks us and doesn't allow us the ability to
Speaker 1: have pause and reflection on where we were and where
Speaker 1: we are now and where we would like to be.
Speaker 1: And this is what Republicans' magism trump. Where they want
Speaker 1: us to be is in a place of tiffy, right,
Speaker 1: because in a place of ease, you have time to
Speaker 1: think and reflect. In a place of tizzy, you're too
Speaker 1: busy seeing how they are stealing from you, how they
Speaker 1: are robbing you of your rights as well as your wages.
Speaker 1: So I want us this week to have conversations with
Speaker 1: our friends and family about how our lives are different now,
Speaker 1: how our thinking is different. Now. Have those conversations with people,
Speaker 1: because I don't want us to forget four years ago.
Speaker 1: And this is my personal reflection because so much in
Speaker 1: my life was upended four years ago. I'm riding the train.
Speaker 1: It is March fifth or sixth of twenty twenty, and
Speaker 1: I'm headed in to go and record this very show.
Speaker 1: And I had received a phone call hours earlier from
Speaker 1: my dad telling me that my mom had had a
Speaker 1: major seizure. Now, my mother, my mother has epilepsy, but
Speaker 1: has been medicated for majority of my entire life so
Speaker 1: that she has normal brain waves and doesn't have epileptic episodes.
Speaker 1: So when he's calling me to tell me that my
Speaker 1: mother had had a major seizure, I'm like what, And
Speaker 1: then he says, they found something. There's a math in
Speaker 1: our brain and they think it's a tumor. It was
Speaker 1: as if every single thing just went into just slow well,
Speaker 1: the sounds I couldn't hear, I couldn't see, like it
Speaker 1: just went dark for me. But I had a show
Speaker 1: to produce, a show to do, so I head into
Speaker 1: the city and by the time I had reached the studio,
Speaker 1: I couldn't do it. I was an absolute mess. So
Speaker 1: I ended up leaving and I had it out to
Speaker 1: Long Island. What would happen over the next several the
Speaker 1: next week or so, because everything happened so quickly, I'd
Speaker 1: also left my marriage and had moved out on my
Speaker 1: own in January of twenty twenty. So it is now
Speaker 1: March and I'm two months living on my own and
Speaker 1: am now dealing with the fact that my mother has
Speaker 1: a brain tumor. And in that time, this mysterious virus
Speaker 1: that you were hearing about on the news, one person
Speaker 1: has it, then ten forty one hundred thousands, and the
Speaker 1: numbers just keep ticking up. But I'm not really paying
Speaker 1: attention because my whole world is being broken apart by
Speaker 1: the news that my mother has to undergo brain surgery
Speaker 1: in a matter of days. When does that brain surgery
Speaker 1: take place? March eleventh, twenty twenty. Let me just give
Speaker 1: a moment of gratitude and praise to the universe that
Speaker 1: my mother was able to get in and out of
Speaker 1: surgery successfully before hospitals shut down. So I had been
Speaker 1: with her, sleeping in the hospital every single night until
Speaker 1: I left the hospital on March twelfth to go home
Speaker 1: and shower, to come back and be told that I
Speaker 1: can't enter the hospital, and I lost it on the
Speaker 1: security guard because my mother is upstairs recovering from brain surgery,
Speaker 1: and you're telling me this place that I had been
Speaker 1: sleeping in every night for the past week and a
Speaker 1: half or whatever it was, because time was a blur
Speaker 1: that I can't return to. Thank God, my mother was
Speaker 1: a relief. And what would transpire over the next several
Speaker 1: months was my sister flying in from Vietnam, Vietnam shutting
Speaker 1: down in her not being able to go back, me
Speaker 1: leaving my home in Brooklyn, and my family being under
Speaker 1: one roof for the first time since I'd been in
Speaker 1: high school, since I'd left for college. And while there
Speaker 1: are so many horrific things that occurred, the loss of life,
Speaker 1: the law, loss of society, the loss of connectedness, I
Speaker 1: can't express enough the gratitude that I have for the
Speaker 1: fact that while my mother was healing and while I
Speaker 1: was going through heartbreak, that my family was able to
Speaker 1: be together. It was the greatest gift. And I can
Speaker 1: say that understanding that I'm saying it from a place
Speaker 1: of privilege. My father lost his mother to COVID before
Speaker 1: there was a vaccine. She caught it and within three
Speaker 1: weeks she was gone. So I'm not without the understanding
Speaker 1: of loss, But in that loss, I can also be
Speaker 1: so grateful for the time that I was given, that
Speaker 1: my family was given because we were able to work
Speaker 1: from home. My mother was just able to rest and
Speaker 1: heal knowing that her world, her family, was right in
Speaker 1: front of her. So while the world was falling apart
Speaker 1: around us, while we had a fucking president that was
Speaker 1: telling people to inject bleach, to not do the basic
Speaker 1: thing of caring for your fucking neighbors, while we watched
Speaker 1: parking lots being turned into hospitals, food lines wrapped around
Speaker 1: for miles in places that I didn't even know had
Speaker 1: food begs, because that's how unstable our society had become.
Speaker 1: That's how big the economic disparities had become. People were
Speaker 1: being laid off. My aunt was laid off, my younger
Speaker 1: cousin was laid off. And I think about this now,
Speaker 1: four years later, what would it have been like if
Speaker 1: we had had an actual leader? How much stronger would
Speaker 1: America have come out of this knowing that we could
Speaker 1: rely on our neighbors, that the masks that we were
Speaker 1: wearing weren't just about protecting ourselves, but they were about
Speaker 1: protecting the people that we love. Four years later, we
Speaker 1: have people that believe that COVID was made up. Tell
Speaker 1: that to the people that have empty tables, empty chairs
Speaker 1: where loved ones used to sit. Tell that to the
Speaker 1: people who have blocked out of their memory in some neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: This smells because remember, there wasn't enough room in the morgues,
Speaker 1: so we were housing bodies in refrigerated trucks. That people
Speaker 1: couldn't gather for funerals to say goodbye to their loved ones,
Speaker 1: So they held funerals over zoom. Folks, it is not
Speaker 1: just about remembering the washing of cardboard and just the
Speaker 1: shortage of toilet paper because people were so fucking greedy, right,
Speaker 1: and gouging of prices, But there was so much humanity,
Speaker 1: and had we had a leader that was actually steeped
Speaker 1: in empathy and compassion and was human himself, how hard
Speaker 1: COVID was would have been made easier knowing that someone cared.
Speaker 1: I can remember sitting with my family every day and
Speaker 1: I'm going to say something controversial now, knowing what we know,
Speaker 1: But if not for the governor of New York at
Speaker 1: that time, just those press conferences and the regular check
Speaker 1: ins and the reminder to care for one another, I
Speaker 1: don't care at this moment. I just remember, like at
Speaker 1: this moment, what we learned after the fact. But I'm
Speaker 1: talking about how I felt in the moment that governor
Speaker 1: did what the President of the United States was not doing.
Speaker 1: There were people that were in other states. He was
Speaker 1: being broadcasted around the country because Donald Trump was failing us.
Speaker 1: I don't want to forget this moment that forever changed
Speaker 1: our lives, forever changed the way that we work, the
Speaker 1: way that we connect, the groundedness that we once had.
Speaker 1: That stuff like a global health pandemic you know happens
Speaker 1: before vaccines in during the black plague, or happens in
Speaker 1: the movies, like an outbreak and contagion. What we lived
Speaker 1: through for those of us who did make it is extraordinary,
Speaker 1: and we do those that did not make it, or
Speaker 1: those that are forever traumatized, those that are living with
Speaker 1: long COVID, we do them a disservice by not honoring
Speaker 1: their memory and honoring the way that our lives have
Speaker 1: been changed. What we experienced and continue to experience because
Speaker 1: of that time matters. It matters that we talk about it.
Speaker 1: It matters that we go back and look at photographs
Speaker 1: and videos. It matters that we remember who were in
Speaker 1: our pods and why we chose the pods that we did.
Speaker 1: Are we still talking to those people and connecting with
Speaker 1: those people? Are we asking each other how we really are?
Speaker 1: Because four years in this country have been so fucking
Speaker 1: stressful and crazy. But if you're listening to this and
Speaker 1: watching this video, you are still here and that is
Speaker 1: worth honoring, That is worth giving gratitude for. If you
Speaker 1: are a prayerful person, that is worth a prayer, a meditation,
Speaker 1: a moment of silence. If Donald Trump and MAGA had
Speaker 1: not politicized to a sickening degree this catastrophic time in
Speaker 1: our lives, we would have memoriams, we would have a
Speaker 1: day of remembrance. We would be reflecting because over a
Speaker 1: million people lost their lives, and the president at the time,
Speaker 1: whose body count was at half a million by the
Speaker 1: time he left office, knowing that it was airborne, knowing
Speaker 1: how fucking dangerous it was back in December twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: but did nothing but exacerbate a crisis. Is a fucking
Speaker 1: murderer on top of everything else he's already been charged
Speaker 1: with because he'll never be charged for the deaths regarding COVID,
Speaker 1: we don't even talk about it. As it was his
Speaker 1: responsibility to keep American safe. He had people turn on science,
Speaker 1: on doctors, People were protesting at hospitals. The very people
Speaker 1: who were risking their lives, from the doctors to the nurses,
Speaker 1: to the administrator, to the janitors to the lunch workers,
Speaker 1: were risking their lives and being protested against because of
Speaker 1: Donald Trump. So when you think be your friends that
Speaker 1: you can't possibly stomach voting for Biden. I want you
Speaker 1: to remember where we were four years ago, and remember
Speaker 1: where we could be right now. Had we not given
Speaker 1: Donald Trump an inch when he came down that fucking escalator,
Speaker 1: and had we told him to go to Hell, which
Speaker 1: is exactly where he fucking belongs, how different our lives
Speaker 1: would be now without the stain, the virus of Trump
Speaker 1: is that still has this country in its grips, the
Speaker 1: world in its grips. But I ask you this week
Speaker 1: to reflect, to journal, to think, to walk, to be
Speaker 1: in conversation with those that you love about what they
Speaker 1: remember about this time, how COVID changed our lives, Remember
Speaker 1: the good as well as the bad, and remember to
Speaker 1: hold space for one another because community is the most
Speaker 1: important thing that we lost, that we reshaped, that we
Speaker 1: reimagined and are still trying to regain. That is it
Speaker 1: for me today, Dear friends, on woke a f as
Speaker 1: always Power to the people and to all the people. Power,
Speaker 1: Get woke and stay woke as fuck.