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By Rosecrans Baldwin
Photograph by Michelle Groskopf
Seven months ago, if you told me I was drinking a Sean Penn cigarette in a remodeled parking lot at Dodger Stadium for the emergency use of a viral pandemic, we were both surrounded by piles of cars full of other nervous people who feared their bodies would be an invisible predator that had attacked more than seven million of their fellow citizens and killed nearly a quarter of a million of them. Array, as the same contagion sweeps the world, closed countries, the global economy erupted; I would have said, Oh, shit, yes. , because clearly, it would be on set for a big-budget crisis movie starring the two-time Oscar winner, perhaps directed through it, anyway, amazing, beautiful, it looks like 2020 is going to be pretty spectacular.
“Seven months ago” is much longer and larger than it was seven months ago.
Seven months ago, I broadened a verb, my wife didn’t have my hairdresser, and I’d never heard my father sob on the other side of the phone. In this world, I have also not spent my Saturdays volunteering on what may be the largest average check in the United States for a new coronavirus, but now I’m doing it. I’ve been looking for this all week. Oddly enough, the status in a Dodger Stadium parking lot with Sean Penn sits slightly on the list of strange things that are happening in my life right now.
Unlike many other well-known people, Penn is precisely as big as you’d expect: frankly, friendly, more tender than I would have thought, it also provides almost painfully, which suited the environment. Around us, there were probably many other people in poor health. Dozens more in gloves, masks and face shields were there to help. I told Penn about the spirit of the framework I had seen among the staff, which I felt like a volunteer. “It even opened my eyes, the way other people join in participating,” he says quietly. “Actually, he removed some of the layers of cynicism. At an incredibly cynical moment.
During a pandemic, time becomes flexible, but some things are certain. Winter is coming. The signs imply that a third wave of coronavirus is about to hit the United States. The lack of government leadership on COVID-19 continues to surprise, if not impress, and Hollywood celebrities have not exactly covered themselves in glory. At the same time, since March, Los Angeles has been a leader in the match, and Penn has become an unlikely figure in that success. Thanks to CORE, a nonprofit organization he co-founded with foreign aid in line with Ann Young Lee ten years ago, along with the City of Los Angeles Fire Decomponent and its local checking component. stadium or one of the many others bound to the desk. and cell check sites in Los Angeles and get a loose COVID check regardless of symptoms, citizenship, fitness insurance or local driving, with highly accurate effects in less than 48 hours. Dodger Stadium handles up to 7,500 patients on a consistent basis. Los Angeles County can process 20,000. And thank you, as a component of a $ 30 million grant from Jack Dorsey of Twitter, CORE has established similar systems across the country, targeting the most vulnerable and underserved communities. served (37 sites in total, from the Navajo Nation to New Orleans to New York) in what appears to be, in my research, one of the largest coronavirus control systems in the United States, if not the largest.
All because a few years ago at Coachella, Sean Penn climbed the level and asked a crowd if he wanted me to take a ride on his bus, and what happened next, curiously, gives both concepts and a forged hope of how we would get there. through what follows.
Ann Young Lee, executive director of CORE, has controlled the organization’s myriad emergency relief systems and network rebuilding campaigns.
Los Angeles is a crisis that doesn’t wait for it to happen: earthquake, fire, flooding. In the face of the homeless crisis in the United States, an example of famine in the United States, an experiment in studies on income inequality went extraordinarily wrong. “We had some preparation for that,” Mayor Eric Garcetti told me, describing the popular Los Angeles emergency planning. “But a virus, not just for Los Angeles but for America, literally had no muscle memory. one once imagined something that would break the global as we knew it.
In mid-March, under Garcetti’s orders, Los Angeles closed temporarily and the mayor began appearing on our screens daily. The city’s check program was introduced on March 20. Soon Los Angeles would become the first major city in the United States to offer a loose check to anyone with or without symptoms. Which is strange, considering how strange the government is. Greater Los Angeles, also known as El Lay, also known as Southland, contains 88 cities and more than 10 million people. THE. It doesn’t even have a fitness branch (the county does). In many ways, Los Angeles is a country in itself very much like the United States, a vast region of other people united less by a not unusual identity than by the feeling of having ended up living next to each other. One big difference: Last winter, when the White House stalled and lied, failing to address the nation’s biggest living memory crisis, Los Angeles stepped in. “It’s a classic case of asking for forgiveness instead of permission,” Garcetti told me. “Certainly, in the vacuum of federal leadership, it was transparent that no one was going to do this if we didn’t do it ourselves.
The Dodger Stadium Test Center is the largest in the country.
Which brings us to Coachella (a non-unusual word in Los Angeles). In 2008, Sean Penn, to some surprise, leveled up at the music festival, just before My Morning Jacket, and told the kids that he had parked some biodiesel buses in the back, if anyone wanted to sign him up for a walk in New Orleans. It was Ken Kesey who met Jimmy Carter on a project to pass and make humanitarian paintings in a town recovering from Katrina. More than a hundred people signed up for it, “have shoes or not,” Penn recalls.
New Orleans has a special position for Penn. During Katrina in 2005, he sneaked in and jumped into the rescue effort, if only because someone needed to. “You kept thinking, like you did watching TV, every minute now that the cavalry is coming,” Penn said before. About 3 years later, after Coachella’s youth served in New Orleans, an organization of another 20 people stayed to continue the work. Reduced to one year and part after that, in January 2010, when an earthquake destroyed Haiti. More than a hundred thousand people died, up to a million people missing. Penn brought in combination a dozen doctors, others who reveled in the response to the crisis and the young people of New Orleans. . . “These are other people whose cars have been parked at Coachella all this time,” he says with a smile, and flew away to see if it can be helpful.
A wide variety of angels shapes the volunteer body. They are bartenders, academics and leaders of organizations, among others. An Emmy-nominated boy this year.
Penn’s father, actor and director, served in World War II as a bomber, the enemy’s tail gunner. Penn, likewise, will meet a moment head on, albeit sometimes in a way that some perceive, in the warmth of the moment, as unpleasant, if not unbridled. Visit to Iraq in 2002 to protest against Bush’s insanity. Covering the 2005 Iranian Tehran elections for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2008, Penn spent seven hours interviewing Raúl Castro. She met the Mexican drug trafficker El Chapo in 2015. It goes against the public’s understanding, the tesseract that society has built around other notable people, of the 4 dimensions of relationships between celebrities and civilians: they are like us, they are nothing . Like us, we need to be them, we would hate to be them. To put it another way, we approve of stars posing for photos with hungry youth, not Hugo Chávez. Over time, Penn faced accusations in the media from Celebrity Grand Gestures Disease’s White Savior Complex. He doesn’t seem to care much what other people think, especially cynical experts. From Haiti, he told CBS News’ Lara Logan: “Do I expect those other people to die from screaming rectal cancer? Yes, but I’m not going to spend a lot of power on this. Unless it is the other people you are looking to help who you care deeply about. “When I have gained notoriety as an actor, they ask you to stop at a youth hospital. I can’t do it, ”Penn told me. “I cannot communicate with a child with cancer or a child without cancer. I’m not smart about that. I see myself as a facilitator. I know how to break down doors and bring in humanitarian workers. This has been my strength. “
In Haiti, Penn’s organization, J/P HRO, later renamed CORE, would not only run a massive camp in Port-au-Prince for others displaced by the earthquake – another 60,000 people living in ramshackle tents on an old golf course – but would also empty it, help rebuild neighborhoods so others could return home. I asked him if his fame had ever prevented him from doing relief work. “I think once I spent nine months in a tent in Haiti, I started gaining credibility,” he laughs. “The Sean Penn of all this is putting a governor on the phone. ‘
On a typical Saturday, about 3,500 patients parking.
Penn is the first to draw much of his credibility from when he met Ann Young Lee in 2010. Currently the CEO of CORE, Lee at the time had more than a decade of control experience. relief paintings for the UN and other groups, running in Congo, Kosovo, Philippines. When he first met Penn, Lee was already doing several years of progression paintings in Haiti. The destruction caused by the earthquake was mind-boggling, he said, but so were relief efforts infrequently. “It was pretty low on the total system,” Lee said. “Like, that’s not a fucking execution. ” When Penn arrived, she didn’t take him seriously; she wasn’t sure he would dedicate himself to staying. However, her approach to interacting with support groups echoed some of her own frustrations. “Sean came in here, that stranger, asking questions that hadn’t been asked before. “Why do we have to do it this way?” At the time, it was boring. I temporarily learned what I was fed up with, why humanitarian aid and progress didn’t paint, it’s because we’re stuck in the way we think about it. “
They joined temporarily. Since then, under Lee’s leadership, CORE has controlled emergency relief efforts across the Caribbean, trained teenagers in the Gulf States in crisis relief, and rebuilt communities in Haiti. The organization prides itself on its immediate action, improvisation and lack of healthy respect for barriers. “Not having a wonderful legal team is helping a lot,” Lee said, laughing.
Testing systems have been deployed in Los Angeles through CORE at about 37 sites across the country.
As we spoke under a retractable tent, six car lanes slowly made their way around the huge Dodger Stadium parking lot, making their way through the verification process: confirmation of his appointment; He receives the check by sticking himself in the mouth under the supervision of CORE workers. Meanwhile, just north of the ballpark, the Bobcat Fire was still on fire. Lee and Penn are from Los Angeles, seeing the pandemic burn all over the country, not to mention. his hometown had been surreal, or they said. ” For me, it was like we had to do anything now,” Lee recalls. “The first trend is,” We’re in the United States, we have systems, we have those amazing emergency reaction institutions, they’ll touch us. ‘But I don’t think it’s in our nature. ‘
“Or we had enough experience, ” said Penn, looking at him. ” The cavalry is coming. “
“We thought, “We have to do something, ” said Lee.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said that when CORE approached, the city was in a position to join forces. “They had a record right in Haiti and elsewhere,” the mayor said.
Los Angeles’ first driving control site was first controlled by firefighters. “I’ve been with the branch for some time,” Ellsworth Fortman, LAFD leader, told me. “It was a curveball. ” The city knew it had to get worse temporarily, but that would get a lot of firefighters out of the country. When CORE succeeded, the city was in a position to join forces. “They had a record right in Haiti and somewhere else,” Garcetti said. I asked him if he was worried about working with an NGO that depended on volunteers; checks seemed to be the kind of paintings FEMA deserves to make, I suggested, or the American Red Cross. “Frankly, I wondered how far they wanted to go,” he said. the scale of his ambition was as wonderful as ours: to succeed in as many other people as possible. “
These days, a typical Saturday at the stadium has about 3,500 patients. The check is self-administered, an undeniable oral pattern that other people perform internally in your car. Volunteers stop at EPI, watching everything, soaking up the heat of the sidewalk, the sun, several hundred engines running. The staff consists of film editors, bartenders, actors and nursing students. Many of them lost their jobs to COVID. A woman has controlled turns for steel bands. An Emmy-nominated boy this year circulates anecdotes about water intakes, like other people’s, perhaps encouraged through the president, who seek to drink the chemicals in the bottle that sells the swab (this rarely happens). the user who pulled down his pants and sealed his own (this happens once).
Volunteers use non-public devices to monitor self-administered oral samples through patients in their cars.
The fact is that we know what happens in the maximum cars, people enter scared. They’re nervous. A parent is sick, or perhaps a roommate; they may have recently lost one or more of those they enjoyed. You see a lot of tension. This can be from illness, monetary ruin, starvation. Everyone who works there is very aware of the seriousness of the moment, that our ability to be there is a privilege. Most of the staff are volunteers; many, after volunteering for a time, become full-time employees. When I asked why, other people said it was the friends they made there, the possibility of playing a role, the feeling of having a goal in a moment of chaos. “I’m an atheist 23 hours a day,” Penn told me, “but I can stick with this concept of what we are intended to do here, because otherwise, to quote a Mark Rylance poem, you are simply wandering, for no reason. not to be there.
“Horrible in itself, the crisis is a door to heaven,” writes Rebecca Solnit in A Heaven Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities Emerging in Disaster. “At least the paradise in which we are who we hope to be, we make the paintings we prefer and we are the guardians of each of our brothers and sisters. It is not known how long this will last. CORE’s Los Angeles monitoring sites, funded at most entirely through personal budget and donations, have the money to last through December. Recently, to increase the budget, stars like Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts presented “Fast Times Live,” a Zoom feature from the Fast Times script at Ridgemont High. Shia LaBeouf played Jeff Spicoli, the marijuana surfer Penn made notorious in 1982, and he went big: sunglasses, tank top, what looked like a hot joint between his fingers. “Sensational,” Penn said with a laugh when asked about his review of LaBeouf’s Spicoli. “Crazy and sensational. ” But he was quick to return the verbal exchange to what mattered the most. Worldwide, more than a million people have died from COVID. One in five was American. In the United States, incompetence reigns, and rubbing your mouth or nose with quick effects, one of the fundamental things we want to succeed in the other aspect of this pandemic, is still far from easy in most countries. At the same time, according to Curative, CORE recently finished its 1,500,000th coronavirus review in Los Angeles.
CORE recently finished its 1500,000th coronavirus in Los Angeles.
In Citizen Penn, a forthcoming documentary about Penn and CORE, Penn describes his initial paintings in Haiti: “We were a plane that was built only after takeoff. And it’s a dangerous race. ” The metaphor is applicable at this time. None of us have done it before; we all want as much as we can find. Nationally, immediate testing will soon arrive, adding paper strip tests that are less accurate but much cheaper; Garcetti said Los Angeles already had a pilot program underway. In partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, an interstate testing pact provides immediate testing in places like Maryland and Arkansas. In New England, Testing Insurance Alliance is running to expand cheap test network paints. National systems continue to expand and adapt. “We are an information-based organization,” Lee said. “We listen, we inform ourselves and we act. “
As a crisis develops, it becomes herbal to question human nature. Besides, it hasn’t been difficult, in the last seven months, to feel emotions in the dark aspect of the moon. Fear, anger, despair. Apprehend, light, besieg. We have the contagion in our bodies, the contagion in the White House. The same week, the preview came back positive, our Saturday numbers at Dodger Stadium soared, and we all wondered if it was a “Trump hit,” an increase in testing. other people who might not have taken the virus seriously before. Not that I’m embarrassing anyone (except Trump). For me, it turns out that, running in the stadium, the setup actually looks like a crisis movie – because we’re experiencing a crisis.
“I’m an atheist 23 hours a day, but I can attach myself to this concept of what we’re meant to do here, because if Array,” Penn says, “you walk aimlessly and you’re also there. “
All of us, like the fitness of our cities, are fragile right now. Everyone I know, adding to me, has it, too. And yet, on Saturday afternoon, I came home feeling better, lighter, more hopeful than I’d felt all week. One of the young volunteers told me in an interview: “What do I ask my friends: what are they going to say in a few years about the role they played when the shit fell?What have you done to him?”
Rosecrans is a regular contributor to GQ. His next book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, will be published in June 2021.
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