From the desk of Dr. Gupta

Yesterday was CNN’s 40th anniversary. For almost 19 years, I have proudly walked into work right past those big red letters in Atlanta. This past Friday, those letters looked a little different, as protests erupted in reaction to the unjust killing of George Floyd. As a doctor, seeing these protests in the middle of a pandemic is worrying, from a public health perspective -- but so is the structural racism that led us to this point. I, like many of you, listened to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms address these protests and the unspeakable death of George Floyd. Her words feel even more powerful in a moment that so many people are experiencing an undeserved pain. Mayor Bottoms is the leader of a city with a rich history of civil rights, and she is a mother of four children. So I wanted to sit down and have a conversation with Mayor Bottoms and listen to how she is handling the weight of an unprecedented time, both professionally and personally. Here's an excerpt (and I hope you will listen to our full talk here). Dr. Sanjay Gupta: You're the mother of four children, Mayor: three sons and a daughter. You're having conversations with them, I'm sure, as many parents are with their children across America right now. Does the gravity, does the importance of what's happening right now, has it settled in with you and your family in terms of the conversations you're having?  Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms: I don't think that it has and I don't think, in a way, I'm glad that it has not. I asked my husband the other day. What will this be called? What will this moment and time be called? And I don't think any of us know the answer to that. I just know it's something extraordinary that we're witnessing. And I've said it in my remarks a couple of days ago: What we've seen happening across Atlanta, we didn't see when Dr. King was assassinated. And so we know that this is this is something different. And not only is it happening across America, we're now seeing it happen across the globe. And the question will be: what will be the difference on the other side of this moment? Will we continue to to see the disruption and and all that we've been seeing over the past few days? Or or will this truly be a revolutionary moment? And I'd think about the words of Audre Lorde quite, quite a bit, "revolution is not a one time event." So, I don't know what this is, that we're in the midst of, but I know that it is something extraordinary that I've not experienced or seen in my lifetime.  Gupta: We are truly going through something that is unchartered here. We don't know the impact that these protests will have on the pandemic itself, the spread of the virus. There were some powerful moments of solidarity, though, during the protests -- that people came together. They sang. They hugged. They were walking hand in hand. Those are the images a lot of people will see. At a time when so many people are hurting like this -- are those moments worth suspending physical distancing mandates?  Mayor Bottoms: You know, this is just this convergence of where we are globally. And even I'm getting a Covid-19 test today because everything that we've talked about over the past two months, this became secondary or have become secondary. So I just I just hope that people will get tested and will remember that we are really we're still in the middle of a pandemic. But I think, Sanjay, the interesting part about that, I think so much of that has to do with what we're seeing bubbling over. And our communities are sick and they're tired and they're dying. They're dying from Covid-19, they're dying from poverty, they're dying from police brutality. And they're -- we're exploding. And it is ... You know, these forces seen and unseen, Covid-19 is the one that's unseen and and police's, police brutality is the one that we can see. So I think in the midst of all that's going on, we focused on what we can see. But we've got to keep top of mind the things we can't see that are killing us too.