On Tuesday, March 10th, Miami students across campus halted on their way to class, inconspicuously opened their inboxes during a lecture, even grabbed their phones mid-shower, to open an e-mail that would change the rest of their spring 2020 semester. The e-mail, as you all probably know, informed us that our classes are to be held online from now until April 12th due to the big, bad coronavirus. In other words, for the next four weeks, half of the school will be venturing home while the rest of the out-of-state students along with Miami University’s greatest delinquents will be binge drinking until they forget that the coronavirus exists.
It was funny at first, fueled by a state of shock and a bunch of memes on social media. My friend and I were walking back from the gym when we found out, utterly caught off guard by this drastic measure made by President Crawford. Nearly an hour prior, we were joking about OSU’s move to online classes, so this e-mail got us tweaking. Within the first few hours of this declaration, a majority of the campus was either at Johnny’s or Oxford Spirits. People were canceling travel plans or making them. Professors were contacting their students, flustered as to what the next move would be. Nobody was prepared.
Now that we’re a few days into this corona break, however, it seems as though this is a very real circumstance and one that many people must take seriously. We must remember that we are still paying money for these classes. We are still expected to complete large amounts of work, whether that be in our bedrooms with no pants on, or a local coffee shop crowded with students that neglected to spend another long break with their parents. I’ll admit, the ‘Green Beer Month’ and ‘Spring Break Forever’ comments on Barstool were hilarious, but in reality, a lot of students are outraged by this epidemic.
Personally, I think it’s an inconvenience. I live out of state and chose not to go home for my own safety. I’m stuck in Oxford. Nobody wants to be stuck in Oxford. The students that are at Brick every night and see this break as an extended vacation are the ones who live an hour away and can drive home immediately whenever they feel like it. Others are still choosing to go through with their spring break plans in foreign locations, which is even worse. It’s all fun and games until you come back from the Florida Keys with sunburn, liver damage, and the coronavirus.
While I think that the media is, in fact, exaggerating the effects of this virus at an astronomical scale to profit off of the coverage, I do think that our health is a privilege. It is easy to take that for granted when there aren’t people dying around us, when most of our friends and family aren’t quarantined, and when America has really good medicine and research facilities. This is not a situation we should take lightly. As more and more campuses across the country are closing, it is obvious that we are in a state of emergency. Regardless, life will attempt to go on, which means that we still have to work for our degrees and keep ourselves mentally and physically healthy.
Wash your damn hands. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.