Dan Kerr Interview, April 19, 2020

SEGMENT SYNOPSIS: Humanities Truck director Dan Kerr reflects on the impact of COVID, both personally, for the Truck operations, and as a country. He discusses how the Truck has been shut down since March, and shares his own challenges in working from home doing distance learning and homeschooling his daughter. SUBJECTS: COVID-19; (Washington, D.C.)

Hi, this is Dan Kerr and it is April 19, 2020. I'm here in front of the Humanities Truck.

We're in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. And since mid March, the truck has been pretty much shut down. Well, yeah, entirely shut down. We haven't taken it out at all since before spring break at AU. Since then, we've been at home doing distance learning. We never restarted campus.

And some folks are taking classes. I'm teaching all my classes online. We haven't been meeting in person with the staff and we haven't been able to take the truck out. As a result, we've essentially had to cancel many of the plans that we had for the fall, and I mean, for the spring.

So, any case, I've been working at home, it's been somewhat tough. My mom just had her fourth che mo treatment on Friday. So I've been trying my best to really be pretty strict about this physical distancing. And, you know, that certainly makes it difficult.

Also my daughter's in elementary school, so she doesn't have school and teaching classes but also helping to support her studying at home, her homeschooling. And so that also is a big challenge, but at the same time, it's been a lot of, I suppose, positive things about spending a lot of time together as a family. Been able to communicate a lot with various longtime friends and family members as well, too, probably more so than I normally do.

So that's certainly been sustaining for me. But it's also very difficult to see all the challenging situations people are facing. I feel very fortunate to be able to have a house, to be able to actually work from home, to have a job.

And so if anything, I think if we learn something from all this, it's that the severe economic inequalities that we have in this country are really making us unhealthy in many different ways, making us susceptible to this disease COVID-19 in ways that, if everybody had homes, had the ability to have access to health care, and had good incomes, that we would be in a much better, much more healthy situation than we are now.

So if anything, I hope from this we learn the importance of really fighting and struggling for economic justice and also to having universal health care for everybody that's not tied to their jobs. And also the importance of sustaining our social connections so that we can hopefully start making some differences and changes after this pandemic is over.

I hope you will join in with me and do your own videos.

Join part of this project that we're doing to try and really gain some sense as to how everyone is being impacted by the COVID-19 crisis that we've been working with and also looking well beyond that in your network. So please do do a video presenting. You know, your own individual experiences with COVID-19. And also your sense as to what needs to be done moving forward in the future. And then once you've done that, please share that with your friends, family, your network, your social network, ask them to contribute too, so that we can really start a dialogue and a conversation and use this moment to really start thinking about how we can make this world a better place to live in after the pandemic is over.

Alright, thank you. Stay healthy, stay well, and I look forward to seeing you all in person sometime soon. Thank you.