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Hi, I'm Bryan Bello. I was invited to contribute to this project by Dr. Dan Kerr, a friend and colleague. It's a great project. Thanks for inviting me. So, how has COVID-19 impacted me? That is a complicated question. It's probably, it's not complicated in the ways that it is for other people. But, so I've moved back in with my parents. I'm a PhD student at American University in the dissertation stage of my degree, and I was living with a friend, but when his living situation was about to change, it kind of forced me to change my own. So I moved back home, I'm in Frederick, Maryland. It has, in some ways, been a great opportunity to, you know, spend time with my parents. It's complicated because my dad has cancer. And he's in a, you know, somewhat advanced stage of it. So I have to be very careful about bringing stuff in the house, my mom is also sick in a way that could, you know, the disease could complicate their lives too. And they're just both a year into retirement, s trying to at least give them some good time together. It's also complicated because I've worked in social justice work in the midst of my PhD program, and for a long time. And I find this virus to be very, ah, detrimental to the project of reconciliation, and, you know, building, you know, harmony and unity through new assemblages of community and identity, in which, you know, patriarchy and white patriarchy specifically, is able to look inward, break itself down through the help of others, and through, mostly through its

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own work, and connect and try to build a new identity in the service of working with new leaders. But the nature of this experience is so different for everyone. Yet, it all falling under one shared symbolic banner that can truly be touched by the entire world. In some ways, COVID-19 acts as this filter that reveals intensely how we were all currently fractured. And so what I think about is how after this virus in theory ends, there are those who lived at home and survived it, living with their middle class parents, and those who lost, you know, tons of family members, were starving. And while that is terrible in the moment, how will culturally, here... How will cultural, how will culture heal? And we've all had such different experiences that reinforced the ways that power already privileges specific groups of people, such as the wealthy, and the white, and the male. So I see COVID-19 as just beyond the literal material damage it is doing to lives. Just this psychic additional kick in the stomach that comes after just you know, so much turmoil leading up to this, related to the systematic devaluing of black, brown, Asian, and female bodies, and, you know, people identifying through different genders. This is just so tragic.

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As far as what has kept me going, um, Reginald Black, someone who's a friend of the Humanities Truck project, is a DC-based journalist who has just recently survived homelessness in the sense that he's in an apartment for the first time within the year. He's doing amazing journalism right now on, journalism on the COVID crisis in DC, and the city's, you know, terrible preparation and all the ways the city, heck, was compromising lives prior to the virus due to its inability to protect its poor and low income people. And he's thriving right now, so I'm trying to support him, however I can. And he's thriving in the sense he's doing really great work. So Reggie gives me hope that there are people we can support and I've been trying to support him, I wish I could be there with him and help him more closely. And what do I hope we will learn from the crisis? That's a tough one. There's so much to learn that we should have already known before. But if I were to distill it into one thing, I would say I just really hope this can be the moment where healthcare for all just becomes a thing we can all agree on. Yeah, and if we can't, after so much tragedy, then I truly think this country is, it's done, it is a failed state. But hopefully it can. Alright. Thank you.