PHOTO OF THE DAY: ANOTHER BANNER YEAR
This photo is from May of 2020 and represents the first year The Courier invited the community to support graduating seniors through its banner project. That is continuing for a fifth year in 2025. Here is what Courier Publisher Jeremy Waltner says about it in this week’s publisher’s column, and the context that goes with it.
It’s hard to believe it’s been five years since the world was thrown into a spin cycle of uncertainty by the coronavirus pandemic. It was early March of 2020 and life’s rhythms were thumping along uninterrupted when, suddenly here in the United States, on March 10, everything stopped. Covid-19 had arrived.
The weeks and months that followed produced a strange new world in which contact with others was disrupted and people began considering things they had never before thought about — CDC guidelines and distance learning and online meetings using a service called Zoom. It was all strange and, oddly, divisive. Some took it very seriously. Others thumbed their nose at it, especially later, when vaccines became available.
Was it all an overreaction? It depends on who you ask. I maintain the safety precautions urged by most in the science and medical community were appropriate, because we just didn’t know the kind of animal we were dealing with and — yes — people were dying. Lots of them.
Anyway, five years has passed and we have long since returned to normal, at least as far as pandemics go. But there are still lingering effects from the Covid-19 era that are proving to be largely beneficial. My church, Salem-Zion Mennonite, continues to livestream every Sunday morning service, an outreach that first began the month the pandemic hit our country. It’s extraordinarily strange to go back and watch some of those first services on YouTube.
Zoom has become the preferred method for many meetings and social gatherings, especially when distance is an issue. Online learning, while far from ideal, was a learned behavior out of necessity, and those tools still exist should that become necessary again for one reason or another.
But the unintended consequence of the 2020 pandemic that I most appreciate is the senior banner project we took on here at The Courier. Graduating seniors had a gutting end to their high school careers that May; winter sports seasons never finished completely, they never got to walk their school hallways one last time with intentional reflection, and graduations were altered considerably. As a way to help soften the blow, we invited the community to support the graduates by sponsoring banners honoring each one; Freeman seniors were showcased on Sixth Street while Menno seniors stood on Fifth Street in that community. Last year we included Marion in our efforts, taking it off the hands of the booster club there which, like here, had started honoring the seniors in 2020.
Anyway, it has all proven to be popular and beloved by the seniors and their families; I now know this firsthand, because I have an 18-year-old daughter who will be graduating from Freeman Public in May.
Senior sponsorships are on a first-come, first-served basis, so if you would like to be part of this tribute, let us know. Email courier@gwtc.net or call or text 605-351-6097.
