EDITORIAL: The choice is yours

Published 8:32 am Tuesday, August 25, 2020

At any other time in our history, crowds of college students getting loud amid a night of raucous partying would warrant a handful of gripes and grumbles at best. We’d ordinarily consider it a rite of passage, a coming of age. 

Under normal circumstances. 

But we aren’t living under normal circumstances. This isn’t any other time. 

COVID-19 changed all that for all of us. College students are no exception. 

We are smack dab in the middle of a global pandemic, caused by a contagious disease we still know very little about that has no vaccine. We can debate statistics, give our take on the data, and argue who is susceptible and who isn’t, but the fact remains that as of Sunday, 176,000 Americans have died — 5,000 here in Georgia and 46 in Baldwin County. 

They are no longer here. Some were young, some were older; some male and some female. Some had pre-existing conditions. Others did not. 

We don’t know how any of us will be affected by this disease. 

While college is supposed to be a time of carefree freedom and fun, it’s also a time to transition into adulthood and take on more adult responsibilities. 

Local students who ignore the reality of COVID-19 by not following campus and local government guidelines and partying in large crowds are ignoring the reality of this contagious virus. 

If the local parties and college gatherings we’ve seen thus far are taking place in off-campus housing, then where are the landlords for these dwellings? Why aren’t they taking action? These gatherings are a violation of the city’s emergency ordinance, so why is no one being held accountable?

Not only are these parties putting students at risk, but they are also putting faculty, staff, and other campus employees at risk. Not to mention others in this community who encounter potentially infected students, and their older family members when they return home for a weekend visit. 

It also puts law enforcement at risk when they respond to calls of large gatherings. Georgia College police must work with Milledgeville Police to reign in these gatherings. 

Someone needs to take the lead and all sides need to work together to address this. The university can’t afford to look the other way and simply say it’s an off-campus issue.

This isn’t meant to cause unnecessary alarm. We know that in the times like these, human nature often dictates that we look for somewhere to point the finger. College students are often an easy target. That’s unfortunate. True, our numbers were increasing before students returned to campus, but the fact remains that these large gatherings amid a global pandemic when local cases and cases on campus are increasing are not helping; they’re hurting the fight against the spread of COVID-19. 

The students who recently returned to local college campuses need to take a lesson and recognize that they can’t act like college kids at every other point in our history. 

That’s unfortunate and unfair. 

But life isn’t always fair. 

These students are jeopardizing their own education and the education of others and putting lives and risk.

Somehow we must as a community, find a solution for these gatherings. Students must take on a large part of that responsibility by policing themselves.

Sooner rather than later.

Students, ask yourselves: Do you want to party or do you want to go home?

The choice is yours.