By Abby Zutz
I have thought a lot about the world I live in, and how this world has changed in the last year.
New Year’s Eve 2019, a couple of friends and I stayed up waiting for the new year, while making cookies, and laughing every two minutes we discussed how surreal it was that 2020 was just a couple of hours away. We discussed plans for the new year, and our hopes for the summer. 2020 was the year we all were going to thrive! 2020 was our year!
It was down to the last three months of the year, the hardest, yet the most fun times of the year. The girls basketball team had finally made their state appearance and we were getting ready for the tournament. I remember the media saying “COVID-19 cases starting to rise in the United States,” and me being so mad because it was no longer a two-day tournament, but only one day. As I got on the state basketball fan bus, we were all talking about this “COVID-19” stuff and if it was truly that serious. I remember saying “Will they close school?” and a person sitting near us stated, “It couldn’t possibly be that serious,” considering we had no idea really what this virus was.
The Sunday after the state tournament we got a message from the school saying we will be taking a four-week pause in school due to the Coronavirus, the first two weeks we will not have any work but the following remaining two weeks we will be working online. Seniors were saying goodbye, as they probably wouldn’t make it back to school and teachers would say, “It’s only four weeks!”
Here we are over a year later, and life, school, and day to day things are still not 100% normal. As I look forward to next year 2022, or even the start of the 2021-2022 school year, I really truly don’t know what to expect. Will the masks be stored away? Will we be in school all five days with no distance learning? Will we be able to have a normal lunch hour again? Will we be able to participate in choir in the actual choir room? So many questions for the next year, and no answers. This world has been so very crazy over the past year and a half, and will a vaccine make this world normal again?
I miss the world I used to live in – the world that we didn’t see “pandemic,” “quarantine,” “mask mandate,” “Black Man Killed by Cop,” “Another School Shooting Happened Today,” “The Vaccine,” everytime we went on the internet. I miss the days when the word “pandemic” wasn’t in my everyday vocabulary.
With the vaccine being released, I hope you take the opportunity to make the world a little bit more normal, and get vaccinated, and always remember just because you may be able to fight off this virus, you have classmates, friends, brothers and sisters, grandpas and grandmas, moms and dads, that maybe can’t fight this off. So do it for them.
I only say this all because I miss the world I used to live in, and the world I live in today is not the world I want to live in tomorrow; it’s up to us to make a difference.