About two weeks ago, I published an article about how The Pleiad is going to continue publishing as normal. With normal comes our annual April Fool’s Day edition: The Plebian, a series of mock articles about events that aren’t actually happening. In the past, there’s a chance that these articles have had a history of occasionally being taken a little too far, like when we said Hillsdale College was going to close and Albion would absorb all of its students. Since then, we stay away from writing anything that could be remotely believable. This year is no exception.
This year, April Fool’s Day has fallen at a time when jokes are more difficult to make. They’re more difficult not to take seriously. They’re more difficult to not believe when there’s constant news flashing, constant reports on the state of the world and contrasting messages which may or may not contradict one another.
There’s a time for jokes, and there’s a time for seriousness. But with that comes a time for normalcy and a time for consistency amid the seriousness of the world. There is a time to smile during all of this, even when it seems as though there is nothing to smile about.
We don’t want The Plebian this year to undermine the situation at hand. We don’t want to miss opportunities to report on what’s going on and keep the community updated and informed. But, with that being said, we do want to maintain our normal publication. Part of maintaining our normal publication means sticking to tradition and doing the things that we’ve always done, abiding by the little things that might brighten someone’s day, little things like The Plebian.
The Plebian is something, and I know I speak for not only myself but the entire publication by saying this, that The Pleiad staff looks forward to every year. It’s something that the student body looks forward to as well. Faculty. Staff. You name it. The Plebian is something well-known and well-loved by the Albion College community, one of the many things that binds us together as one Albion.
Going off of that, especially, with all the chaos going on in the world right now, The Plebian is not something I want to take away from Albion.
Jokes are hard to make and hard to take during this time, but I think that we all deserve a little bit of a break from the constant threat of danger, fear and anxiety. Even if I can’t erase the situation at hand, I can’t make it go away or fix it, I can do something about it. I can draw my attention elsewhere. I can focus on other things, things that make me happy when it seems that happiness is lost. And I can try to draw your attention to those things as well in the hopes that they will bring you as much joy as they bring me.
I don’t want it to appear as though The Pleiad is taking matters at hand any less seriously than they need to be taken. We recognize the importance and the pertinence of reporting all aspects of the pandemic that we’re all living through, the history that we’re living through.
It’s the job of a newspaper to report on something that will one day be history. Journalists write about history as it’s happening, documenting that history through their words, through their articles and through their publications.
With that being said, The Plebian is also history. It’s something that has deep roots at Albion College and deep roots with our publication, and I don’t want to sacrifice that.
If you so choose, don’t read our articles today. Stay tuned on Friday when we resume our normal publication. But, if you’d like a break from the world around us, I hope that The Plebian this year can offer you that.
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