Written Reflections
David Shneer, Documenting a World Historical Event: Life in COVID 19, Spring 2020
Kyle Reichenbach
Covid-19 Journal Entry #3
April 8, 2020
History major Kyle Reichenbach shares his observations on recording history close to home. He writes:
"I saw some military jets flying above my backyard yesterday. They were F-16s, single-engine multipurpose fighters. There is an airport near my house called Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport that occasionally hosts them for “touch and goes'' where they land on the runway and immediately take off again. They each had fuel tanks and missiles, a pair of AIM-120 AMRAAM and AIM-9 Sidewinders. I was talking to my brother about them and he said that he saw a military cargo plane fly the other day, said it had four propeller engines. He said it could be an AC-130; I talked to Dad about it and he said it was a CH-130 cargo plane landing at the airport to deliver masks and ventilators to later be shipped to Denver medical centers for coronavirus ... It blows my mind when I think about it, of the effort the U.S is doing to prevent coronavirus deaths being visible from my own backyard. I never think about history being made in the moment, maybe it's because I don’t think about it that way until after it has already happened. It gives me a funny feeling though, the moment that it's happening it becomes easy for me to think: “huh that's cool lookin what's going on?” And later I would only later realize that it's a consequence of the historical events going on right now. Its a weird thing to think about really."
Credit: Beamer, Brian. Facebook Private Group: "80027 - OhOh27 - The Original OhOh27." Photos Taken April 7th, 2020. Accessed April 8th, 2020.
Eloise Aragon
March 2020
Eloise Aragon, Spring 2020 graduate, with an B.A. in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, shared her thoughts:
"To make quarantine less lonely we decided to set up weekly Zoom calls. Zoom calls or Facetime calls became the only way to be able to hang out and socialize with friends and family. We also learned how to be creative with our calls. For instance we have themed meetings, so in the image [right] is costume themed."
April 26,2020
"Today would have been the day of my last student ambassador’s banquet. Senior year banquet was an event I was looking forward to since I joined the organization, the spring of my freshman year. During the banquet seniors are recognized for their dedication to the organization, and seniors have the opportunity to say a quick 5 minute speech. Unfortunately, the banquet had to be moved to a Zoom call. It was obviously not the same experience. During the Zoom call I had the opportunity to still say my senior speech, but it was a little awkward talking to 80+ people through a camera. It hit me again that my senior year came to an end too soon, and I felt as if a lot of potential memoires got robbed from me. I am not going to lie, but I teared up when I heard my best friends’ senior speeches. There are no words to described how much I am going to miss them when we all go our separate ways."
Maxwell Cassity, Epidemic Literature in the Time of Covid-19/Sars CoV2 Pandemic, English, Spring 2020
Andres Godinez-Andrade
Shock, Covid-19 and Historical Accounts of Previous Pandemics
May 4th, 2020
CU Boulder Spring 2020 graduate (BSBA, Finance and Accounting), Andres Godinez-Andrade writes:
"When people consider their lives and goals, amongst other things, they think about what can reasonably go wrong, and what can reasonably go right. No one would have predicted where the world is now. It is a Black Swan event. Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined this term in his book, The Black Swan. The New York Times' title of his article comments on this type of event as the impact of the highly improbable. Even in 2020, experts could not and did not predict that the world would come to a complete halt this year, and drastically change normality for practically everybody, due to Covid-19. For a period, people, including myself, seemed in denial that this could happen to us.
Just as predicting this pandemic was impossible, predicting how the world will make its way out of the pandemic is just as hard. Will there be a vaccine? Will there be a second or third wave of infection? ... Several years from now, all the events will likely seem so explicable, given the benefit of hindsight. However today, in the eye of the storm, the mass perception of what is true changes so quickly. Given that things change so fast, the uncertainty of how the future will play out is one of the most perplexing facets of this virus.
When reading about dystopias or societies ravaged by epidemics, fiction or nonfiction, it is so easy to disassociate oneself from the suffering in the novels and stories we read this semester. Like the Black Swan, it is also so easy to not be able to conceive the magnitude of how catastrophic events affected people in these stories. Specifically, for people my age who attend college, this should be attributed to growing up in the 2000s. On a mass level, our generation had been unintentionally conditioned to believe that nothing significantly bad would happen to us ... That is how protected this group felt ...
... Hence, not only was this pandemic so unfathomable, our upbringing almost made it impossible to genuinely empathize with people like Edgar Allen Poe who used some of his writings perhaps as a therapeutic exercise to cope with how tuberculosis impacted his life ...
... Although there are people whose views fall on the extremities of the bell curve, at a certain point, a significant amount of people realized that Covid-19 was serious. If people were doubting that a virus could pose a threat and attack the US, there came a time where that doubt was gone. The time-period between semi-normality, where the omen of the virus was no longer across the world but instead a 1-hour flight away, and stay-at-home-orders was filled with confusion, misinformation, and rabid predictions ..."
Danny Long, Radical Science Writing, PWR, Fall, 2020
Emily Milla
December 10, 2020
Emily Milla's poetry centers on the 'exhaustion and hardship that quarantine and the virus itself has brought to my own life and the lives of millions.' She continues: 'I mainly aim to encompass the hurt of losing loved ones to COVID-19 and the frustration with those who choose not to prevent the spread of the virus.'
Grandma Doesn’t Do That
A lady with white hair told me
‘the virus sticks to it’ when we
talked about masks.
Where does it go when there is no mask?
To my uncle we didn’t get to say goodbye to.
Her bright red lips pulsed with regret
‘I’m sorry’ she said… but she still won’t wear one.
Why is she sorry?
Lonely Mourning
Graves are always lonely.
but before,
we said I love you
and laughed together
before, we kissed their forehead
And said “see you again”
before, we picked their forever clothes.
but this time,
You sat in a hospital with only the doctors
and mumbled over phone calls trying to breathe
We didn’t kiss you, or laugh together, or say goodbye.
You were alone, and we are too.