So, my blog thread kinda worked out in terms of current events with colleges and the current state of the country due to the coronavirus.

I feel a little defeated right now, to be honest, but I guess we’ll delve into this despite all of that.

There’s a lot of problems facing the world with the emergence of this particular disease, but one affecting the largest amount of people is the cancellations of schools and colleges. Kids are being homeschooled by their parents, public schools are operating on a snow day basis, and college students are essentially doing their classes by FaceTime and having essays upon essays piled onto their workload to account for the lost time and shift in curriculum. It’s certainly a disconcerting change, to say the least.

What does this mean? I don’t think even college boards or school boards know the answer to that either. How are graduations going to be held now? Are kids going to have a graduation held on Zoom? Are they going to have everything they worked for reduced to receiving a diploma in the mail? Are they going into the world to begin their real adult lives without the ceremony that creates the feeling that this chapter of their lives has ended?

Or what about the college freshmen, who may have been beginning to like their second semester at school after a rough adjustment period during their first semester? Will they now feel like they need to transfer, and never give the college a real chance? What about all of the new members of sororities and fraternities who won’t get their real initiation to feel like a real sister? What about the high school seniors and freshmen who won’t get to tour their top schools or go to their accepted students days? My accepted students day at Penn State was life-changing. I felt like I belonged. I pity anyone who doesn’t get to experience that feeling.

What about the parents who have to learn how to settle their 4-year-olds long enough to do their work of counting and coloring (which I actually was the one to do today while babysitting)? What about all of these people?

The worst part is, we can’t be upset, really. It’s for our protection, for our families protection, our friends and the people who can tell us the history the rest of us are too young to remember. My immunocompromised pregnant sister is someone who’s at risk, and my dad with diabetes and high blood pressure, and my mom on blood thinners with high blood pressure, and my 74-year-old grandmother. We need these unfortunate displacements of our lives so that the people close to us can survive. We will make it through Zoom University, but if we don’t do this, those people won’t. That’s why those problems need to be dealt with, and it’s a sucky tradeoff, but it’s necessary.