No inspiring movie this weekend to report about like the last 2 Sundays, as I wasn't exactly "inspired" by the 2019 movie Hustlers starring Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez.....it's about women hard on their luck who expanded strip club jobs into a business of hustling men through some devious means after the 2008 financial crisis. My takeaways were that I didn't realize how bad the 2008 crisis hit regular people, maybe because I "hid out" in law school and didn't have a source of income to begin with, and also that I'm probably underestimating the economic toll on regular people due to the 2020 pandemic, despite what I hear about the labor market being favorable and companies actively trying to hire and not finding enough candidates.
May has traditionally been Asian Heritage Month in America, and while I do appreciate the gesture and the section of the library dedicated to Asian culture ( I found a nice Pop History of Asian America full of influential Asians like Steve Aoiki, George Takei, Sandra Oh, Daniel Dae Kim, Ken Jeong, etc.) I've never really found the month to have any sort of measurable effect for me (never got a discount at Chipotle for being Asian, or be congratulated walking down the street to be Asian. I HAVE been mock-cheered while running by people to "congratulate" me for running, which I find annoying, but I can think of many more negative instances of the general public pointing out my Asian identity than positive ones. It unfortunately goes with the territory, at least for now- Asian Americans are seldomly depicted in positive lights or as heroes in mass culture (the recent successes of Crazy Rich Asians, Shang-Chi, etc. is helping to change that, so I hold out hope and not just a Debbie Downer), but I do feel an underlying sense of resentment towards Asians by certain people, whether it be the micro-aggression "China virus" used to blame the virus on Chinese people, or just being pointed out as "Chinaman" and not in a positive light, I find that the further down in sophistication the level where I'm operating at, the more likely my Asian American identity gets derided. (Nobody in lawyer circles, for example, even notices that I'm Asian).
Stacey Park Milburn was the feature of a Google "Doodle," where Google points out a certain event or person on its home page, a week or so ago. Stacey was an LGBTQ activitst who was a Korean American disability rights activist. Sadly, she needed dialysis treatment for her kidney cancer (a member of a family also had this type of cancer and needed surgery, so I know how much of a crisis this can be) but surgery was delayed for Stacey due to the pandemic, and she passed away on May 19, 2020, which in a cruel twist of fate was to be her 31st birthday. It may be a somewhat touchy topic, but Stacey's case really signals to me that there was a devastating hidden cost to lockdown measures in American, quarantine, and totally shutting down the world that we knew: other problems besides Covid developed, including depression, loneliness, and delayed treatments. Sure, Stacey's kidney cancer might have been delayed regardless whether lockdown measures were applied because so many Covid cases went to the hospital, clogging up the resources, and doctors/ nurses weren't as available during those early months in 2020 anyway, but I do really wonder if quarantine was a net benefit..... if the world had not locked down, or locked down in a different way, lock down certain portions of the population, etc., if it would have been any worse than the results we get. I'm a big proponent of "hindsight is 20/20," and the CDC/government purportedly chose the best option with the limited information they had at the time. Statistically perhaps a population of potential Covid patients might have died if we didn't lock down, but it's a grim reality that one death is tragic, a million deaths is a statistic (Stalin quote)- people like Stacey Park Milburn became part of the statistic of people who passed away at least partly due to the lockdown.
I do appreciate the Google Doodles because they give attention to the lesser known people/ events in history, those who might not pop up in a trivia question but nevertheless had courage and/or some sort of impact on the world and should be recognized, whereas trivia, like history, is just a bunch of stories/lies people have agreed on." (Napoleon quote). I don't necessarily trust history/ news nowadays to be an accurate reflection of the outsize impact of different people (For every George Washington, for example, there are thousands of soldiers just as impactful who didn't happen to be in a position of power and get all the accolades for the American Revolution), and often I really wonder if these historic people are worth memorizing, committing to memory, or if we're just memorizing a fact/statistic/story, not a real person. Stacey Park Milbern feels much more like a real person, if only because we lived in the same time and were contemporaries.
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