Coming back to campus at the beginning of this month, it was a weird site to behold.
As I walked around the familiar places I’ve seen the past three years, Nash Library, the Waldron Campus Center and the Palumbo Academic Center, I noticed a very glaring change.
Everyone was wearing a mask, people were carrying hand sanitizer like it was water and people kept their distance. There were no more handshakes, hugs or high-fives, now replaced with elbow taps and waves.
Posted everywhere were signs with directions on how to properly distance and be safe. Hallways I had walked through countless times were now roped off and inaccessible. Temperature checks were ever-present before I went into the Café to grab a quick meal. Metz workers have face shields on and the entire setup of the dining hall had been reconfigured to suit the guidelines established.
It was truly something out of a movie, and it also happens to be the new reality we find ourselves in.
I, like many others, don’t like it. Nobody wants to walk around in public wearing a mask and not being able to live a life of normalcy and convenience.
However, the fact remains that we are not living in normal times, and we can’t have the normalcy and convenience we all crave just yet.
In order to get back to the reality we all miss and cherish, we need to adjust to the current reality.
That means wearing your mask at all times, maintaining social distancing, not going to parties, not sharing food or drinks, keeping clean and maintaining your personal health as best possible.
Regardless of whether you think masks are effective, whether you think this virus is as problematic as we’ve been led to believe and whether you feel that these measures are justified or not is, frankly, irrelevant in the given situation.
We have all paid too much money and worked too hard to try to return to a semblance of normalcy, only for a few bad apples to ruin it with reckless behavior and a lack of consideration for others.
I would think that I speak for many other members of the Gannon community — students, faculty, staff, families, etc. in saying that we want to stay here and we want to get through this semester without having to repeat the events of this past spring.
Yet, in order to do so, we need to be a united team. We have to look out for one another, and we have to be encouraging when times get tough, and believe me it’s easy to get discouraged from time to time.
But what we can’t do is allow ourselves to get complacent and to claim victory so soon into the semester. If we’re going to win and conquer this virus, move past this pandemic and work our way back to the normalcy we miss, it truly does take sacrifice, compromise and most importantly, hope.
If we can adjust with the right attitude, the sky’s the limit to what we can accomplish on the road to victory.

MICHAEL GUIDO
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