Readers may notice a running theme throughout our first issue for this academic year. We now live in a country radically changed due to its efforts and failures to address the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Many of this week’s stories touch on the guidelines now in place campus-wide to help promote health and safety as we live through this pandemic and its ongoing impact on society at large.
The editors want to stress the importance of following these guidelines, especially the mandates for wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. As much as it should not be the responsibility of the public at large to help mitigate disasters of this scale, the members of the populace at OCU, in Oklahoma, and in America have an obligation to mitigate the spread of this disease. The administrative EOC has worked tirelessly to create rules and guidelines designed to keep campus running while minimizing the spread and potential impact of COVID-19.
As members of this community, our first priority should be supporting and following those mandates. This should be done not out of simple compliance for authority, but out of a humanistic compassion for our fellow people on campus. Everyone must realize they present a possible point of transmission to the people around them and take efforts to mitigate any spread they may cause. This does, unfortunately, involve some personal sacrifice. This year will be characterized by socializing from afar and even limiting contact with friends outside of class settings. This does not mean we cannot adapt.
Students can wear their masks around the friends and faculty they care about in order to help keep them safe. We can meet and socialize in open spaces, instead of small rooms where distancing is difficult and transmission is easier.
Students and faculty may feel pessimistic about the odds of remaining on-campus. These worries are based in a beliefs that our peers cannot be trusted to follow protocols and that perhaps if a small group of people stop following protocols, everyone will.
It is scary to rely on everyone else in order to maintain a sense of security, but we practice this every day whether we know it or not, simply by being around others and trusting them all to be good people. The new rules on campus are guidelines for being good people, and if we all commit to following them, we may be able to prolong our time on campus this semester and still create a memorable, unique and exciting college experience.
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