Our Part in History

It’s weird, isn’t it? What’s happening now, while senselessly boring, seems relatively insignificant. I mean, we’re teenagers. Our favourite thing to do is bury our faces in our phone and not talk to anyone; so, this is just a legal enforcement of our natural behaviour. But what strikes me is that, while we see this as a few weeks of boredom and actually having to speak to our families, in 20 or 30 years’ time, our children - given the world hasn’t ended by then - will be telling us about the stories they were learning at school surrounding our current situation.

How are we going to explain this to them? “Oh, so someone ate a bat, everyone got sick so we decided to do keepy ups with toilet rolls and sing happy birthday to keep us alive.” Seems a little odd when you say it like that. But that’s not what we’re doing. When you think about it, we’re not treating this with the same blasé British arrogance the world is used to, in fact, quite the opposite. Perhaps this is the biggest example of unity we have shown in decades, if not longer. Everyone has everyone’s back, apart from a few wannabe hardmen who think they’re big because they still go out, and that is something that has not been seen in this country since WW2.

You see, looking at this negatively is going to drive us insane, possibly before the boredom does, but look at it as a blessing. Straight off the back of one of the most toxic elections in years, and even worse than that, Kobe’s death, this pandemic has somehow seemed to calm the tensions between nations. Kim Jong Un hasn’t threatened to kill anyone for a little while, Britain is finally putting the public before twisted political agendas, and countries are actually offering to help each other; what’s that all about? Let’s be grateful for America and their anti-lockdown protests bringing a little bit of weird normality back.

I know this sounds like a lot of waffle, and it probably is, but essentially what I’m saying is that this is not a bad thing. This is our chance to make a difference. This is our chance to learn something new, motivate ourselves, help each other, actually learn what our parents were like as children, if you dare to find out. This is an opportunity for us to write our own little part of history how we want to. It is our generation’s chance, despite every other generation hating us, to make this place somewhere we want to be a part of. So let’s take it. Let’s keep running 5k and posting sweaty pictures on Instagram stories, let’s keep posting Bill Clinton smirking in a pile of Vinyl, and let’s keep doing things how we want to.

Will Hobson, S, L6 th