Blog 3

Corona Chronicles

5 Images:

These five images are all of my fears currently, as of April 15th 2020. I am now so used to my current situation, of my repetitive lifestyle, I feel like normal life will seem new when we go back to it. If I had no homework, I would lose track of my days and the dates and time would be like an illusion. At some point I think we would all go insane. Back to reality: There has been recent news of the possibility that social distancing could continue until 2022 if a vaccine is not created. This can result in a ton of things. My personal concern is that summer will be cancelled, meaning we have to social distance through out most of the summer. Firstly, that would just be sad and uneventful. Summer is supposed to be fun. I miss interacting with my friends. I can have an okay summer at home, because I can still go outside, and there is a pool at my dads, but that’s not good enough. But the bigger issue is if social distancing continues past summer and into the school year… I’d hate to miss more college, like everyone else. But bigger world concerns are economic depressions and mass population death. I’m scared, as well as others, that we are going to be in an economic depression like the 1930’s. What if 1/3 of the population dies like what happened Europe because of the plague??? If we go into an economic depression, I’m scared what my family and friends and everyone will have to endure… like losing our homes… not being able to afford food, then dying… so much is in the unknown. Some people are not obeying the social distancing laws which is prolonging the possibility of getting back to normal life. Life as we knew it might just never return, imagine that? Maybe we has humans deserve that for destroying and exploiting the earth and animals. Maybe this is karma. What I realized is I am remembering my dreams more often and more vividly, but I hear that’s common because our minds are less occupied during the day now.

Blog 4:

“Leadership in a Time of Crisis: Evaluating a speech”

The way President Donald Trump speaks sounds like noise to me, just noise. You want to know why? Well, because when the crisis began he acted unprofessional and he acted like it was no big deal. Before the crisis, he fired the pandemic team. He’s… special. In this speech about the outbreak on March 11th 2020, he says, “Our team is the best anywhere in the world. At the very start of the outbreak, we instituted sweeping travel restrictions on China and put in place the first federally mandated quarantine in over 50 years.” To me, that sounds wrong because he didn’t take this situation seriously at first. He soon would regret some of the things he said in the speech, like how we had “maintained” the outbreak better then Europe when now we are at the top, literally beating every country. The purpose of this address is to update Americans on the Corona crisis and what the government is doing for the country. The audience is Americans, because it’s the president of the United States addressing something to us, but the people who typically actually listen to him are his fans… On march 11th, our country was not as bad with Corona as the rest of the world, so it didn’t seem too bad yet. He proposed an increased funding bill for the Corona Virus. The emotional state of the audience watching this on that day was probably full of anxiety and fear do the unknown. But, at the moment, he stayed positive in hopes the virus wasn’t going to become insane. His positivity can also seem like arrogance though. Unfortunately, he was wrong about his hopes.

Blog 5:

Personal Choice: Will Colleges Open for in Person Classes this Fall?

There have been recent updates of colleges announcing that they will have in person classes for the fall semester instead of online classes. The thing is, the presidents and whoever else of these colleges that are making these announcements are doing so in hopes this will be possible. Life may not even be back to normal then, so how would college work? It would literally be impossible to social distance at college because people live together, we have to sit near each other in classes, the dining halls, etc. That’s a future concern, but a current one is how the economy is taking a hard hit right now, but what’s also affected are the economy of higher education schools. The issue with not having in person classes at colleges is that they are losing money. Colleges profit and are able to offer housing and materials, etc. because of the room and board fees. So with most colleges giving refunds of some sort, they’re losing money. Some colleges are receiving millions if they’re minority serving institutions, according to IHE Staff. I have heard different options as to how to approach going back to college, one being that they test every single student coming back to see if they have Covid-19. Even if we can go back, how would we function there? Would student life just.. go back to normal? Because how would they make it different? I’m thinking the whole party scene might decrease in the beginning… But who knows. My cousin goes to The University of Georgia, and they recently announced having in person classes this fall. But for me, as a New Paltz student, that’s not the case yet. For those going back to school, and I am hoping we can as well, will we/they have to wear gloves and masks everywhere? Will there be curfews or some other weird regulations? If those are requirements, then I’d rather do that and be at school then stay home for the fall.