Grounded: A Community Story

By Kathryn Kahn

2020 in Oakland, California. A quiet neighborhood halfway up the hill. As the world is rocked by crisis upon crisis, a group of neighbors comes together in hope.

The second book in the Sheltered series, Grounded continues the story of Rachel and Carlos, living on the top floor of his late abuela's home as they try to stay safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. The house is full, with the Nguyễns occupying the main floor and the Montessas in the basement. Up and down the block, their neighbors are also avoiding the risk of getting the virus while they lead their changed lives and cope with the problems of the world that intrude into their quiet street.

2020 is a year full of crises: Health systems and social systems strained beyond their capacity by the pandemic. The death of George Floyd and other Black men killed by the police. Black Lives Matter demonstrations and White supremacist counter protests. Economic distress. Wildfires and smoke from climate change. Widespread lies and hateful rhetoric. Toxic politics and a disputed election. And these problems are not just headlines about distant places. The lives of regular people everywhere are affected, including in this neighborhood.

As households face their own fallout from global events, the people on this block learn that they can depend on each other. Neighbors support neighbors with warm hearts and helping hands. They raise each other up through the power of love and community, and in the course of helping others, they each find new strength and purpose.

The kindness and friendliness described in this story exists in neighborhoods everywhere, anywhere neighbors care to know each others' joys and problems, and are ready to reach out with a generous spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667803616

Book preview

PREFACE

The catastrophic pandemic of 2020 killed millions, upended the lives of billions, and wrecked economies and health care systems worldwide. In the United States, federal leaders downplayed the public health dangers and hampered states’ efforts to protect their populations, resulting in one of the highest case rates in the world. This devastation shone a bright light on other wounds that had been festering for a long time, and many disturbing truths were suddenly revealed with excruciating clarity. At the same time, aggressively venomous politics made it impossible for leaders to have honest conversations about these issues, let alone shape solutions together.

Six generations earlier, the Civil War had exposed a monstrous abomination: an economy that depended on humans being treated as property. But American racism was barely bruised by the freeing of enslaved people. Almost immediately, revisionist history was being spun, lionizing Confederate heroes who had fought and died for the right to cruelly subjugate and maltreat other human beings. Decades after the end of the war, statues honoring the Confederacy were erected in many southern cities, and the entire struggle was reframed as states’ rights, and government interference, ignoring the question of what the states had actually wanted the right to do. Racism continued to be normalized there even as some other parts of the country tried to shake it off and were sometimes partially successful. The South never healed from the Civil War; consequences were still felt a hundred and fifty years later, and not just in the South.

The United States had emerged from World War II with an egalitarian attitude, particularly regarding opportunities for those brave young people whose youth had been spent on battlefields in Europe and the Pacific. The G.I. Bill made college and home ownership and better jobs available to millions of White Americans, while almost entirely excluding veterans who were Black. In the decades after the war, the economy was reshaped, and the so-called American Dream, where hard-working people could count on a place to live, medical care when they needed it, and opportunities for their children, had all but disappeared. The sad truth is, it had always been a myth in many communities.

At the same time, the idea of prosperity theology began to circulate among self-identified Christians who also happened to be White and affluent. Many came to believe that God rewards those He loves with earthly wealth. The obvious implication was that unsuccessful people (as defined by their wealth) just weren’t as beloved by God, and better Christians should not be expected to help worse ones. The rich and powerful observed their fellow citizens across a great divide, through a lens of cynicism that killed any chance of empathy. People who needed government assistance came to be labeled Welfare Queens. People who couldn’t find or afford health insurance were allowed to die from lack of medical care, and society felt no remorse. By the last decade of the 20th century, the gap between the rich and the poor had widened to a chasm, with the middle class deeply eroded and increasingly insecure.

Climate change exploded with a vengeance. The dreaded and predicted tipping point was in sight. The whole globe experienced catastrophic storms, devastating droughts, and calamitous wildfires. Crops failed, and famine claimed many lives. Meanwhile, cynical monied interests pretended it wasn’t happening, and convinced gullible people that it was all a hoax. They delayed new environmental rules with lawsuits. They continued to pollute with fossil fuels, destroy rain forests and other forests, and generally make a nice profit by running their businesses without regard to how they would affect the future of the planet and the human race.

It wasn’t surprising that many people came to believe democracy wasn’t working for them, because it wasn’t. The electoral college, which may have made sense in the 18th century, became in essence a tool of voter suppression, and by the time the 21st century began, a vote for president in Wyoming counted four times more than the same vote in Texas or California. Polling places in predominantly Black neighborhoods were closed with suspiciously high frequency. Dirty tricks were played; social media was used to spread false information about supposed changes in election day, about immigration checks and arrests at polling places, and other scary lies. When states adjusted voting rules to allow people to vote more safely during the pandemic, it was vehemently resisted by those who hoped to keep some citizens from voting at all.

These sociopathic and anti-democratic trends increased slowly, and like the proverbial frog in a pot, most Americans didn’t notice until the damage was profound. The inevitable consequence, for America and the world, was 2020.

CHAPTER 1 — MAY 2020

Humans adapt, humans survive. In disastrous times, when the future seems the most murky and forbidding, humans still try to lead their lives. They care for their families, they work, they fall in love, they look to a better future. They create art and improve their living spaces and learn new skills. They dream of future happiness as an antidote to current sadness. They search for new ways to go about their lives.

In Oakland, California, like most places, the ability to stay comfortable during the pandemic was largely governed by wealth or the lack of it. At the top of the hill in this hillside city, some people were relocating to more luxurious quarters elsewhere. Jobs and schools had gone online, and many who owned vacation homes, or could rent them, were migrating there and leading their city lives virtually. Some of the more affluent actually bought spacious second homes in picturesque rural areas.

At the bottom of the hill, those who were able to get stimulus checks were stretching them as far as they could. Many were still housed only because of an eviction moratorium. Those who were already homeless were increasingly likely to be on the streets because shelters had fewer beds during the pandemic. The newly unemployed scrambled for jobs, some successfully, but these jobs often put them at increased risk for Covid and didn’t pay well enough to support their families anyway. At the bottom of the hill, many people didn’t have enough to eat.

Our story takes place halfway up the hill, in a neighborhood situated between affluence and poverty. There are many blocks like this in Oakland, residential streets with a mix of apartments and single family homes, some neighbors who have lived there for decades and others who are newcomers from near and faraway places.

On this block, Rachel and Carlos were still working from home. For them, this was the apartment on the top story of Carlos’ family home. Carlos had lived there for a decade, since the death of his grandfather. His beloved grandmother, Rosa Gómez, who had occupied the main part of the house, had recently died of Covid-19 while on a trip to her childhood home in Mexico.

Rachel moved in with Carlos soon after the shelter-at-home order two months earlier. She had asthma, putting her at higher risk if she caught Covid, so she and Carlos were careful, and seldom left the house and the yard except to go running together in the mornings. Rachel, an animator, had mostly worked from home even before the pandemic, so her work changed very little. Carlos, who managed a workgroup of coders at a gaming company, found it in many ways more efficient to work from home, and was quite happy to work at his kitchen