Welcome back to the Loveliest Village on the Plains. To the freshmen, welcome to your new home and — perhaps to some of the sophomores as well — welcome, for the first time, to a normal college experience.
Or, as close to normal as we can get at the moment.
For the sake of total transparency, it was hard to decide a topic for this editorial.
We’ve spent over a year talking about COVID and the last several months encouraging everyone to get vaccinated, to look out for and care about other people.
If you’re a returning student and you’ve kept up with us to this point, you know the drill.
To all students, we ask that you wear your mask, social distance as much as you can and get vaccinated.
America is one of the only countries that has an abundance of the vaccine. Despite being able to walk into nearly any drugstore and get it, as of Aug. 6, Alabama threw out 65,000 expired doses of the vaccine, according to State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris.
The more of us that get it, the faster we can put this behind us, and Auburn might even give you $1,000 for it.
A warning: some of the content here and on the website shares information about vaccines and encourages everyone to get vaccinated.
It’s kind of important, so we want you to know as much as possible.
Keep reading for more, but before that — we want to reiterate something we said at the end of last semester: Go easy on yourself.
Pandemic fatigue is still very real, and sooner than you might think, it will be two years since the COVID-19 pandemic started and put an abrupt halt to our lives.
Two years is at once short and eons long — long enough that the hyper-vigilance exhausts you, and short enough that you remember how things were before and crave for that normalcy.
Like the normalcy of standing maskless in a Starbucks line and having someone sneeze uncomfortably close to you and being mildly disgusted instead of being afraid for your health and those around you.
While there are some things that are returning to normal, there are other things that might never be the same.
It’s like we’re in a car, in a ditch, and the tires are working furiously to get us up and out, but there’s not enough momentum to cross the top of the threshold. We’ll get out eventually, but we may need a hand.
If you are tired, that’s okay. If you don’t know how well you will do this semester because of fatigue — also okay.
Don’t be afraid to reach out to other people for support — to get through the rest of this, we’ll need each other, and we’ll need everyone to get vaccinated.
We’re as exhausted of talking about this as we’re sure you are of hearing about it.
Let’s make this one of the last times we write an editorial on this. There’s not much else we can say about it and not much else you can do about it other than getting vaccinated.
Try it out, and we’ll keep you updated on how everyone’s done.
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Editorials represent the majority view of The Plainsman's editorial board and do not necessarily represent that of the entire newsroom.
