Phoebe Nott wants people to stop blaming students for everything
I was in the queue to get into my local Wetherspoons. It was just before the 2nd lockdown. It was raining, I was wet, with no jacket because I wanted to look cute. We had been waiting outside for 40 minutes but I wasn’t mad, I knew it would be like this, that’s why I left an hour earlier than normal. Getting ready at 6:00 to score a table just seems like life now. This middle-aged man gives me the dirtiest look he could muster and mutters, ‘These damn students spreading covid’. I wish I had a more mature response but I didn’t, I flipped him off and chain-smoked for the rest of the time I was waiting, just to really grind his gears.
I am not the voice of my generation, so I probably just strengthened his hatred towards Uni students even further. But I was so fed up with hearing that it was all my fault. We had been told to ‘support the economy’, ‘eat out to help out’, and still maintain our uni lifestyle which had been decimated before our eyes. So that’s what we were doing.
I wasn’t mad at the guidelines, the rules, and the restrictions. I knew it was necessary. We followed them to a T, ‘no more than 6 people’, ‘wear your mask when you go to the bathroom’, ‘stay 2 metres apart’. It was the older people, hugging at the bar, shaking hands and not wearing masks which just screamed hypocrite.
My friends and I joked that we were supporting the nation’s economy all on our own, by getting takeaways and going to pubs. 100 million meals were claimed in August under ‘Eat out to help out’, and we British are a fickle kind and free meals are always going to motivate us. Surely Rishi Sunak knew this. The rise in Covid cases was inevitable. And now students are the scapegoat, in what always was a terrible plan.
When the proposed 2nd ‘Eat out to help out’ was announced, I held back on my celebration of (almost) free food. I felt like we were going to get trapped in the blame pit all over again. As greedy, stupid, selfish students. The Government needed us to support the economy but couldn’t justify the increase in covid cases. So they needed someone to blame. And the middle child which is Uni students, ignored and patronized, of course, got the butt end of that deal.
