I turned on the news and my home was underwater. Drowning.

I was just back in Houston for a visit in May. It was still true: everything in Texas is bigger, even bigger than you remember, especially after you’ve been away a while.

On Thursday April 27 UCSF held the 10th Annual Chancellor’s Leadership Forum on Diversity and Inclusion, but I was not entirely convinced that all of the leadership were there to listen. In fact, one exchange in particular told me that when it comes to diversity at UCSF, lip service sometimes takes precedence over action.

Professor Robert Reich believes that the greatest current threat to our democracy is not our president, not congressmen, and not the bureaucracy of our political system. It is that Americans have lost faith in the strength of their country’s democratic institutions.

“Is the March for Science political?” my friend asked me a week before the march. “Why are you doing it?” I thought about these two questions leading up to the UCSF Stand Up for Science Rally and March for Science, which I participated in along with hundreds of UCSF students, postdocs, faculty, staff and community.

In college, I used to have this one thought every finals week after weekends of pushing back studying while going to bars and binging on TV shows, only to finally cram in the library and study like a life depended on it.

HIV rates are declining as a whole among men who have sex with men, but rates aren’t decreasing for Black and Latino populations. The goal is Getting to Zero, but are the institutions dedicated to the cause actually dedicated to these groups?

I am a Christian. And I am gay. These two factions of my life have clashed and pulled me in opposite directions my whole life. Among my church family, I heard words like abomination, disgusting, unnatural. Among my LGBTQ family, I heard words like bigotry, narrow-minded, unloving. My choices? Go to hell or live denying myself of love. This rhetoric left me so suffocated, to the point that I actually played with the notion of an irreversible “easy way out” in college. So naturally, I moved to San Francisco.

The future of medicine is prevention. And yet, like so many organizations so excited about measurable outcomes that they’ve forgotten the purpose of medicine and public health policy — to heal and help self and community resilience — UCSF is considering axing its 19-years-running Chancellor’s Concert Series. Citing lackluster attendance and other priorities, organizers announced a possible end to the series during the March 2 concert at Cole Hall. The office of Campus Life Services is missing the forest of health through the trees of short-term thinking.