Home is the front line for the COVID-19 crisis unfolding in our nation. For many, we are finishing projects we’ve been meaning to tackle and spending time with family members who are usually too busy to sit for dinner at the table. How you spend time sheltering-in-place says a lot about the world you live in. Normally, our differences are masked. It’s hard to tell who gets free lunches at school and who doesn’t, who needs the library’s free internet access to complete homework and whose home has the fastest broadband.
The pandemic lays out the differences in “home” starkly.
We live in a state where the very people working on keeping us safely in our homes are having trouble living in theirs. These are the grocery store workers, or the janitorial staff, or the cooks in our favorite restaurants. They are single moms and their kids. They are our teachers, our firefighters and our police officers. They are the seniors at our church who help in Sunday School. They are our neighbors. They are our fellow Texans who work hard but whose wages just can’t keep up with the price of living within their communities.
