Gardening holds hands with serotonin levels. It’s an organic neurotransmitter, relaying a sense of well-being after a few snips of hand pruners. During the darkness of pandemic and politics, we can discover peace among plants, solace in soil.
What personal enjoyment do you harvest from time spent in the garden? Well, it’s personal, but a few folks opened their hearts.
The pandemic has dramatically affected how we get around. While movement has rebounded from lockdown lows in March and April, people still travel less, decreasing road congestion from pre-coronavirus peaks.
Public transit has seen the steepest declines. On New York City subways and Bay Area Rapid Transit, passenger loads plummeted 90 percent. Sacramento Regional Transit lost 75 percent of its riders. Ridership has recovered a bit, but levels are still far below norms. The revenue loss created an existential crisis for transit. Even in the best of times, transit finances are perilous. It will take time, and maybe a vaccine, for people to feel comfortable enough to flock back to buses and trains.
The counter-intuitive correlation between money and homelessness continues to confuse Mayor Darrell Steinberg and city leaders. The correlation goes like this: The city raises money to house homeless people, yet the number of people living on the streets grows larger. More money equals more homelessness.
Steinberg recently said Sacramento would receive about $28 million in state funds to combat homelessness. The dollars would become part of a $62 million campaign to convert old motels, manufactured homes and other sites into supportive units for unsheltered people.
During a pandemic, it’s only natural to turn to the most socially distanced place you can go—not just 6 feet apart, but 6 feet under. The Sacramento Historic City Cemetery on Broadway is seeing an uptick in visitors, says park maintenance worker Megan Crose.
At work among the gravestones recently, Crose recounted a colorful story about a man—Franz Louis Asch—buried in the city cemetery’s New Helvetia plot. In 1877, the 22-year-old Asch paid a fateful visit to a Virginia City brothel. “He was making a lot of noise and someone downstairs was yelling up at him to be quiet,” says Crose, who got this oral history from Asch’s descendants. “He was a little drunk and said, ‘Well, who’s going to make me?’ After they went back and forth a couple of times about quieting down, the guy downstairs went upstairs and shot him.”
I am a Black man, a cop and honored to be Sacramento chief of police. I hold this job at a perilous time. Countless progressive chiefs across the country, many Black, are being removed. They are collateral damage in the Black Lives Matter movement, scapegoats for a racist reality they didn’t create.
In a recent op-ed in the Bee, I discussed our police department’s response to summer protests that spread across the country. The response from retired law enforcement officials, and others, was immediate. Emails, letters, voicemails and social media posts were critical of SPD’s strategy and me personally.
