Author: James Wu

Naftard started the topic Coronavirus in the forum Prof. James Wu_10am_Eng1121_D420_Spring2020:

Naftard Sammuel
Coronavirus

On December 2019, a virus called the Coronavirus emerged in Wuhan China. About 3 months later the virus spread from Wuhan China to other parts of the world. The Coronavirus can be spread by coughing without covering your mouth, sneezing around others without covering your mouth and nose, and getting in contact with others with the virus without protection. Symptoms of the virus include coughing, sneezing and fever.The virus is very easy to spread from person to person because it is in the air. Covid-19 (another name for the Coronavirus ) is a respiratory illness that affects the respiratory organs. Before the virus is able to enter into your respiratory organs it test the level of your immunity.If you have a strong immune system , then your immune system can fight the virus and get rid of the virus before it can spread throughout your body and becomes severe.However,if your immunity is weak then your immune system will not have the strength to fight the virus, therefore the virus will travel into your lungs and cause you to start coughing, sneezing and give you a fever. If left untreated the virus will destroy the respiratory organs which will lead to shortness of breath (the inability to inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide).
Because of the Corona virus the world is going through a recession. The economy dropped drastically. A lot of people are now unemployed and a lot of businesses are closed. Teachers and students now have to practice distant learning,which have a negative effect on a lot of students, especially secondary schools and primary schools.Distance learning in school puts a lot of students at risk for failure,because a lot of students does not have the resources (computers, cell phones, laptop,Ipod,and tablets) also, a lot of students does not know what online classes felt like until after the outbreak of Coronavirus.
Viruses can only live for a couple of hours if they are outside of the body. According to a study that was published on March 11 on medRxiv, viruses can live in the air for up to 3 hours, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 72 hours on plastic and stainless steel. This study shows that someone can become infected both directly and indirectly. Washing your hands and staying at least 6 feet away from people are some ways that you can prevent getting the viruse. Also, avoiding touching your eyes, nose and mouth is a great way to not become infected.

Douglass, Frederick.  “Learning to Read and Write.”

http://learningabe.info/fd_ReadandWrite

Douglass, Frederick.  “Secession and War,” in which he recounts advising President Lincoln during the war on recruiting for the African-American brigades.

http://www.learningabe.info/Douglass_article_3.html

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the famous 54th Massachusetts Brigade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/54th_Massachusetts_Infantry_Regiment

Here’s the lecture of Professor Edna Greene Medford on Abraham Lincoln

https://www.c-span.org/video/?466542-8/abraham-lincoln-emancipation

Please don’t plagiarize any other author’s work.  This includes other students’ published comments on this blog.  If you are cutting and pasting to quote what someone else has written, please use quotation marks, or clearly state you are calling attention to someone else’s writing.

Thank you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_9DXEnEd-Q

This may be useful.  Knowledge is power.

Please reflect upon this information.  Does it change your thought process on the current health crisis?  What other sources of information can you pursue?

Research as inquiry means finding what you need to know to stay healthy and prosper.

http://learningabe.info/fd_ReadandWrite

“After viewing (Professor Medford’s lecture on video), it didn’t really change my viewing of Wilentz but it did make me look more closely into Hannah Jones’ writing in the “The 1619 Project”. In her writing, she holds Thomas Jefferson and James Madison accountable for their actions in the wrong treatment of African Americans but she also makes a point about Abraham Lincoln. She finds him guilty because within his proclamation he allowed ex slaves to join the union army and fight against their former owners. In her writing, she states, He believed that free black people were a ‘‘troublesome presence’’ incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people“. In this section of her writing, she goes into Lincoln’s actions to invite these former slaves and inform them that he was able to get congress to acquire funds to ship black people once freed to a whole other country. This doesn’t add up. Why would President Lincoln insist they fight in a war for their freedom in America just to be shipped to another country for their efforts? Knowing this, it made me question Professor Medford’s statement when she says that Lincoln did not want to originally include black men in the military because they wouldn’t be strong enough to stand up against their former owners on the battlefield. She then states “He found out very quickly that black men were anything but cowards and that they were spoiling for a fight”. I think he was very disappointed in what America has become and he knew that even with time African Americans will still be wrongly treated within America but he wanted to ensure that equality was written truthfully within the lines of the constitution.”

Perhaps this is what Wilentz means about the “relentless unforeseen.”  Despite Lincoln’s fear that free African Americans would never get along with whites in the U.S. after the Civil war, because whites would not accept them, once he took the action to free the slaves in the south during the war and at the same time started the African American brigades in the union army, inviting them to join these brigades, even though he didn’t know it at the time, full citizenship for African Americans would be necessary in the U.S. and perhaps he came to recognize this before he was assassinated.

The point is, once you have the African American military troops, the demand for citizenship and equality is unstoppable. No, it didn’t come immediately; there was continued debate before the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments; and after the 1865-1877 reconstruction period, the south reverted to a racist Jim Crow society.  Nevertheless the idea of asking the U.S. army veterans of the African-American brigades to leave the U.S. after the war was obviously untenable and in fact impossible.  Which is what happened.  They had no intention of leaving and stayed and continued to demand equal rights.

We do not know what is going to happen in the future.  But we must fight for our ideals and what we believe is right.

So for Hannah-Jones to just say that Lincoln didn’t believe in equality does not tell the whole story. Perhaps at one point he didn’t.  Professor Medford in her lecture says he changed his view during this time.

Perhaps it isn’t so much what a person or some people believe, but what we do to change the laws to create a more just society.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?466542-8/abraham-lincoln-emancipation

Super informative lecture.  Please view and discuss in your reflection.  What did you learn that you didn’t know before?  How does this change your thinking on Hannah-Jones and Wilentz?

Hannah-Jones and Wilentz

Hannah-Jones, p 18.
“Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American independence, quipped, ‘‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’’

Here Hannah-Jones criticizes the 1776 founders for claiming they themselves were slaves to the English king; meanwhile they either held African slaves themselves or allowed others (the Southern planter class) to hold slaves.

Yes, this was hypocritical, and it seems that those in this 1776 period were aware of it.

On the other hand, we can also see that there was no simple way in 1776 the break away colonists could have simply abolished slavery at this point. The southern colonies were committed to this economic method of agricultural production. So what did they do? Were they concerned with the injustice of slavery as the first priority? No. They weren’t. Should they have? Perhaps.

Does this make it true that the U.S. was founded on the basis of racism?

Wilentz says that at the time, the people in 1776 did not know what the future would be. This is the “relentless unforeseen.” His article discusses the abolition movement in the 1776 period. He claims that the U.S. revolutionary period was part of and perhaps the major movement towards abolition of slavery.

Wilentz:

“More and more in these pessimistic times, we are learning once again, and with a sense of justice, that the United States and its past are rooted in vicious racial slavery and the lasting inequities that are slavery’s legacy. We learn too little or not at all that the United States and its past are also rooted in the struggle against slavery, and in the larger revolutionary transformation of moral perception that produced that struggle.” (Wilentz p.3)

“…the United States was defined, from the start, neither by American slavery alone nor by American antislavery but in their conflict .”(p.4)

“But to those who believe that the United States was based on racism at the beginning and has always been racist and always will be,
Slavery, in this view, wasn’t simply an important part of American society at the founding and after; it defined a nation born in oppression and bad faith. While this view acknowledges the ideals of equality proclaimed by Jefferson and others, it regards them as hollow. Even after slavery ended, the racism that justified slavery persisted, not just as an aspect of American life but at its very core.” (Wilentz p.5)

“This (view) is vulnerable to an easy cynicism. Once slavery’s enormity is understood, as it should be, not as a temporary flaw but as an essential fact of American history, it can make the birth of the American republic and the subsequent rise of American democracy look as nothing more than the vindication of glittering generalities about freedom and equality founded on the oppression of blacks, enslaved and free, as well as the expropriation and slaughter of Native Americans. It can resemble, ironically, the reactionary proslavery insistence that the egalitarian self-evident truths of the Declaration were self-evident lies.” (Wilentz, p.5)

“Some of that cynicism is on display in The New York Times Magazine’s recently launched 1619 Project, enough to give ammunition to hostile critics who would discredit or minimize the entire enterprise of understanding America’s history of slavery and antislavery.” (Wilentz p.5)

So this is the big difference between Hannah-Jones and Wilentz. Wilentz points out there was a significant anti-slavery mentality in the 1776 period. To just sweep that away, or dismiss it as hypocrisy, is unfair. It also tends to agree with the southern pro-slavery view, later the confederate belief system, which openly argued for slavery of an inferior race. The confederacy claimed that the true United States was a racist one.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/the-story-of-a-coronavirus-infection.html

It’s a more creative genre, but as far as I know, the facts of the scenario are a possible case.  Feel free to comment.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF9IOB2TExg3QIBupFtBDxg

This person is a PhD in nursing, I believe, retired in north of England.

He posts a video daily.