Mason's Monolog

This is graduation week for a lot of the high school seniors throughout the state. The ceremonies that were supposed to happen last week were cancelled because the governor told the schools they couldn’t be held.

I think us seniors should be able to celebrate with some sort of ceremony. I’ve shared a few ideas in my past articles about how we could hold graduation ceremonies and still follow guidelines, and the schools had planned events, also according to the guidelines.

Unfortunately, despite the accommodations that have been made for these events, the state still said no to any gatherings for graduation. I commend the school for making the effort to give us some sort of ceremony, but I’m disappointed in our governor for not letting us have the one ceremony we’ve looked forward to our whole school career.

We have attended school for 13 years of our lives. It’s a big achievement to graduate. I feel we should get something more than a simple “hey, you’re done and we can’t do anything for you so come pick up your diploma” over a video call.

Anyway, I hope we’re able to hold ceremonies later in the month or maybe in June, if and when everything opens up again. I believe many seniors feel the same way I do. We need some sort of ceremony, even if it’s just a small, families only, gathering. We’ve literally worked our entire lives to get to this point and we can’t do anything to celebrate it. This disheartens me.

I think that at this point we’re blowing the severity of COVID-19 out of proportion. I understand protecting the elderly and those with underlying illnesses, but I feel that they also need to be responsible for their own protection from the virus as well. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be considerate of their situations or be concerned ourselves. We should all be cautious. But, in my opinion, we shouldn’t be as worried as we are. Some people who have caught the virus are saying it’s not nearly as severe as everybody is making it out to be.

I feel we can’t keep the state closed forever, for the economy’s sake. Some small businesses already aren’t going be able to open their doors again when the state opens up. And the governor pushing back the reopening date repeatedly isn’t helping their situation at all.