I graduated college this week.
A moment my entire life has been building up to has come and gone. 18 years of schooling ends with a whimper.
While last Friday technically was the “end” of my schooling, school effectively ended for me in early March. I walked out of my final class for spring break, and headed home for what should have been a fun week of relaxing, hanging out with friends, and maybe knocking out a few video games I had been meaning to get around to.
Then the news started rolling in. Their was a confirmed case of COVID-19 in Fairfax, Virginia, where I went to school at George Mason University. Things slowly began to escalate. Ivy league schools shut down for the rest of the semester, schools around the country began to extend their breaks by an additional week to hopefully get ahead of the oncoming storm. Eventually, Mason decided to extend Spring Break by a week as well.
Things escalated ever so quickly. Next thing I knew toilet paper became more rare than diamonds. Shelves were canned food belonged were emptying out as well, while there were signs around the grocery store telling us how many individual cans we were allowed to buy per trip. A few days later, a scene that felt like it came straight out of a movie took place in Oklahoma City, as a game between the Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder was halted just before tip off as center Rudy Gobert had tested positive for the virus. Quickly, the NBA season was suspended. The MLB, MLS, NHL and XFL followed soon after. A week later, Mason officially cancelled in person classes for the remainder of the 2020 Spring semester. In the span of a few days, life was changed — maybe forever.
It feels weird to think about how different life was then, especially as it was less than three months ago. On March 7th I went to a local sports bar with a few friends to watch UFC 248. That was the last time I “went out” in any sense. Since then, I have been mainly sitting around my house — outside of the occasional walk or grocery store trip.
Months later it is hard to see how this ends. As of time of writing we are nearing the 100k mark in COVID-19 deaths. Even as states begin to reopen around the country, less people are going out to gyms, restaurants, bars and clubs. Many do not want to risk dying just for a fun night out, and this will have long term disastrous effects upon businesses around the country. The bars at Clarendon will slowly become unable to continue operations without the regular Friday and Saturday night rushes, as the bars begin to close, less people will come, leading to whatever remaining bars exist closing inevitably. Restaurants will slowly suffer the same fate, as many will not be able to survive forever relying on take out orders alone.
Compounding the issue, people just don’t have any money to spend anymore. Tens of millions of Americans are now without a job, and the CARES act that many were relying on to stay alive will expire soon. House Democrats are refusing to pass another round of stimulus for Americans, leaving many in financial precarity. This means remaining businesses will find it even harder to keep the lights on, as people have less money to spend patronizing them. This once again compounds the issues, as it means less jobs, and more people is a situation of financial precarity.
This feels like the end-game of the world as we know it. Our system was destined to collapse eventually, but COVID-19 seems to have accelerated it. There is no light at the end of the tunnel either, with a vaccine still probably a year away and even if it does eventually come the economy will be irreparably damaged by then, with body counts reaching unimaginable numbers.
Graduation was supposed to be the biggest moment of my life. Instead, it feels like life ended in March, and we are all just stuck waiting. Just watching our time on earth circle down the drain. Whether we day from COVID, starvation, another sickness, stress or in some sort of conflict that spawns from all of these issues plaguing us today, it feels like we are just sitting around in the midst of the longest running apocalypse imaginable.
This is a sports newsletter.
Sports have been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember. Every year I dreaded the end of Summer break in early September, but was also eager for the return of football season. This was before the days of today where I can watch NFL highlights, film and regularly read news 24/7 on my favorite sport, the return of NFL preseason meant I got to see football for the first time in months. There was nothing more important to me than the NFL, and getting reunited with it every Fall was a magical moment.
The specter of not having football this Fall is legitimately terrifying. Week 1 of the NFL season may be the happiest week of my life every year, and the season seems to give me a huge mental health boost every year. It is a perfect distraction from the stresses of the real world. Nothing matters every Sunday when I get to jump up and down while watching the Detroit Lions play.
It is unlikely that we have a full NFL season this year. While there will certainly be some sort of plan in place to have a season, it will likely not take place in full. All it takes is one player to test positive to suddenly put an entire team out of commission for a few weeks, and there is no way the league can maintain it’s season with teams dropping in and out every week. As much as it sucks to say, we will likely not have much more than just a couple weeks of an NFL season in 2020.
A year without sports just compounds what is already a disastrous year. MLB fans are already finding ways to cope with not having their favorite pastime for the foreseeable future. Us NFL fans will soon have to find how to do the same.
The lack of football this season, both college and pro, will be just another loss of normalcy. The loss of college football this year will have especially troubling long term ramifications, as many programs may not be able to survive long term after losing an entire season’s worth of revenue. Some colleges have even cut some teams already due to the losses of revenue at the end of the last spring season. College football, just like the MLB, may literally never come back. Just like the weekends out at the bars, life has probably changed forever, and we helplessly have to accept it as their really is nothing we can do about it.
We built a terrible system, and all it took was a slight disruption to topple the house of cards.
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Congratulation Mansur!
Wish you best of luck and hope to see you soon!
Haroon Khan (Mamu Uncle's Son)