Last night, a sea of maskless students gathered on the streets of The Hill destroying property and fighting first responders. People were posting pictures of the crowds on Reddit, Facebook, Snapchat, and any other popular platform. Pictures of fireworks. Videos of people flipping over cars. It was pure chaos. CU students recieved a text from the school, threatening to punish anyone involved at the site of the party.
Social media played a key role in this disaster because we, CU Boulder, trended on Twitter nationally. Fox News, ABC, and countless other news networks covered the story of the worst side of our school. The same CU Boulder that gives us outdoor activities and top-tier programs is also the school now known to be the place where 800 young adults decided to throw a gathering whilst in a pandemic.
And the rest of us were all so excited. Classes were gradually on campus again; the vaccine was rolling out. It’s heartbreaking to realize that college students had to stay inside for a whole year now. We just want the world to be normal again. But the reality is that 500,000 people have died from this pandemic and we need to realize that the state of this world outweighs whatever happened on the sixth. If you’re a freshman reading this, you don’t know how good CU Boulder is when it’s in person. College will always be stressful but it comes with in-person club meetings (like Her Campus!) and literally having the best food on the planet. You can walk around our beautiful campus every single day. I even miss the crowded office hours in the engineering center. I shouldn’t have taken anything for granted. And we were all so excited.
I understand wanting to socialize with people. Humans are social creatures – we aren’t supposed to isolate ourselves all the time. And I don’t think hanging out with people every now and then is a crime. But last night, my heart sank when I saw the sea of maskless people flipping over cars. I knew that we were back where we started, or worse.
Do we really have to throw giant parties during a pandemic? Of hundreds of people? Seriously? I thought we were better than that. We’re smarter than that. We’re more empathetic towards at-risk people than that. But we weren’t.
And those who did attend the party, honestly I’m speechless. It’s a mix of disappointment and sorrow because maybe the isolation made you crack. But as adults, we have to need to understand that our actions come with consequences.