Kent Bewley's News Story Collection

This is the month of March 2026. It is wild to think that we have come this far. There were many people who didn’t think we’d get to this point. The pure truth of emotional manipulation is all too common in a world driven by concern and corrupted by negative thoughts of fear and doom. But if there is one thing that is certain in human nature, it is that we desire clarity in our lives and take any threat to our tranquility, health and safety very seriously. Or at least that was the sentiment that was displayed six years ago on this month with the same exact daily sequence. The first Sunday of March was the first day of March. On the 11th day of the month, it was a typical Wednesday. Except that it wasn’t. It became an inflection point of our modern society within hours. The World Health Organization announced the widespread movement of an unknown virus called SARS-Cov-2. Otherwise known as the coronavirus, this illness had already spread to countless nations and had made its arrival to the shores of the United States. The symptoms were random, from a strong cough to head pain to shortness of breath and a strong fever. There was even the possibility of contracting the virus without feeling any symptomatic effects at all. But the virus was taken seriously enough that it could cause a massive amount of death in a world populated by billions of people.

So, the health experts of the world gathered together and decided that shutting down almost every form of international transportation for a temporary period of time was a good move to make. They also came to the conclusion that all massively populated nations(pretty much every country in the world) had to mandate a quarantine upon their citizens for a temporary period of time. Non-essential travel would be prohibited and people would be ordered to stay confined to their homes. Workplaces were shut down as a result of the oncoming pandemic and people were forced to work from home via teleconference calls on their laptops or home computers. The entire world was shocked. Never before had something like this happened in the modern age of social interaction and technological advancements. This was done to protect anyone from contracting the virus, although that was a highly wishful thought. People would contract the virus, millions of them would. And millions of folks would die due to being unable to overcome the illnesses they suffered from the virus. But there were a lot of things that were temporarily sacrificed in order to safeguard the health and safety of the rest of us who survived. One of those things was community engagement in physical locations. Although there were areas where people defied the directives of health boards and local governments ordering a quarantine and prohibiting gatherings of people from different households(some of those threats of enforcement were empty, others were more strict), there were no organized gatherings of thousands of people in locations where cheering and competitive joy are the norm. Those locations were ballparks, basketball gyms, football stadiums, hockey rinks, golf courses, tennis courts, and soccer venues. No matter how big or how small a playing venue is, there will always be some amount of people present to cheer. Well, that wasn’t the case for the majority of 2020 and a good chunk of 2021. Because recreational sports leagues were shut down along with high school, college and professional sports. The sports world shut down on Mar 11, 2020 after news occurred that players on the NBA’s Utah Jazz had contracted the virus. Rudy Gobert’s playful microphone ploy turned out to be a massive mistake and an instance of karma coming back to bite a fool in the buttocks. Nobody thought COVID-19 was a serious threat on Mon, Mar 9, 2020. That all changed 48 hours later. Oklahoma City was ground zero for the beginning of the shuttering of not just the NBA season, but the entire sports world. There were NBA games happening at the time that the Jazz-Thunder game was supposed to tip-off. Instead, that game was canceled, the fans in attendance were told to leave the arena and the games that were occurring were allowed to finish. One of the games was in Dallas, where the owner of the Mavericks Mark Cuban looked at his smartphone in shock of the news that NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced that the 2019-20 season would be suspended indefinitely until further notice after that fateful Wednesday evening. Games that were scheduled to tip-off later in the night on the West Coast were canceled and the fans who bought tickets to those games were told to go home.

The NBA was not the only league impacted by this sudden and swift worldwide lockdown. The MLB spring training games were canceled in Arizona and Florida and the 162-game schedules for all 32 MLB teams were put in the dustbin of history that never happened. The NHL regular season was shut down as some of the teams in the hockey league spanning the borders of two neighboring nations share arenas with some NBA teams. And most importantly of all, the most well-known tradition in the month of March when it comes to sports was canceled. No chance of being rescheduled, just completely ended. The NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournaments were canceled. The Final Fours would be called off. Thousands of student-athletes would have no chance to compete for tournament spots, because there would be no tournament. No conference tournaments for those teams who hadn’t played in them yet. For those who had won their conference tournaments and punched their tickets to the Big Dance, it was basically a consolation prize that they were lucky to win before the entire world was put into quarantine mode. There would be no Selection Sunday, no March Madness, no National Champions in the 2020 season. It was all over in an instant and some student-athletes didn’t even get to have a proper conclusion to their collegiate careers in their Senior years.

It was all very heartbreaking what we had to go through and how long we had to go through it. But it was for the collective good of the global community. Or so we were told. We were told that this virus had a high mortality rate, but in a world of billions of people, that would mean hundreds of millions of people dead. Overreactions were the norm on social media and on the majority of our news media networks. People thought that their breath could be taken away in an instant if they contracted the virus. That was clearly a gross misinterpretation. Shortness of breath is one of the symptoms of the virus and it can be harder to overcome for those with preexisting health conditions or anybody who has a form of thyroid or throat cancer. But the majority of people are blessed not to have to live with those conditions for the mass duration of their lives. However, the truth didn’t matter because it was covered up in fear. When emotions rule the decisions of world leaders, nothing good comes of it. Only more dreadful news of lockdown extensions and people being unable to take a risk in their lives because that could be seen as illegal and unlawful against the might of the government. Eventually, risks would have to be taken if we wanted to get the world reopened. And they were taken, with plenty of precautionary measures put in place.

Cloth-masks were worn mandatorily in indoor public locations. People had the freedom to leave their houses to go to testing sites for possible detection of the virus set up by local government health agencies. Long lines of people stayed in their cars to get tested for a sickness that they may or may not have had and having to wait for days or weeks to receive their test results. This was optional for people who wanted to be sure that they weren’t sick, but it became mandatory for those who were working essential jobs in hospitals, food markets, supermarkets and airports(still running with minimal flights in a nation). Eventually, mass testing and “social distancing” became the norm for players and coaches and broadcasters and other league officials that unlocked the ability for us to return to viewing live sporting events and not simply viewing replays of games with historical significance in the years of old or recent past. Isolated “bubbles” became the temporary norm for teams and sports leagues to prevent any outside contact with the virus. It still didn’t guarantee that nobody would contract the virus, there were bumps in the road for them to overcome. The news started coming out that the sports leagues of the MLB, NBA, NHL and Major League Soccer intended to return to competition at an unknown date. It turned out that the summer month of July was when sports would return to being played live. But there was one important detail that would make this return an odd one. That detail was that there would be no spectators from the outside world allowed to enter onto the grounds of sports stadiums or arenas. None at all.

Imagine seeing a sporting event with no fans in attendance. It almost feels like a cruel sick joke. But it was a reality that we all had to live through in the latter months of 2020 and the earlier months of 2021. No fans allowed. Sports are nothing without fans in attendance and yet this was the best way for teams to play out their shortened schedules for the remainder of their seasons and for baseball the entirety of its regular season. Looking back, at the time it was the right decision to make. There was limited knowledge of the virus’ actual ability(or inability) to massively infect people and everyone who contracted COVID-19 had a mostly different experience. Some people got it real bad and had to fight for their lives. Others simply had a similar experience with Covid as they would have with a common cold or fever. Taking simple cold or fever medication for those people would make them feel better within a few days or a week. But knowledge is power and we know so much more now than we did back then. We also have something that wasn’t widely available in 2020- a vaccine to help combat against the antibodies of SARS-Cov-2 that manage to infiltrate the immune systems of random people. So, without a vaccine and without the confirmed knowledge about the virus’ origin point and its actual mortality rate among the general population, we had to take precautions. And those precautions were necessary if we wanted sports to return.

Return they did, and the authenticity of some teams’ championships was put into question due to the lack of fans and travel to specific locations. But in the end, the mission was accomplished and in due time the fans would return. They in fact did for some playoff games in one of the bubbles that MLB set up for its postseason play. Arlington, Texas was the site for the first fans at an American professional sporting event to attend since the pandemic started. There were some college football stadiums that also allowed a limited capacity of fans to enter their stadiums and sit in socially distanced groups within the sections of the stands. But this was the first pro sports event with fans back at the newly-built Globe Life Field, the home ballpark of the Texas Rangers. The National League Championship Series between the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers had a limited capacity crowd of around 10,000 or so spectators let into a stadium of approximately 40,000 seats. It was the best we could do and the series didn’t disappoint. The Dodgers came back from behind a 3-1 deficit to defeat Atlanta and make it to the World Series for the third time in the past four seasons. They would face the winner of the ALCS, who were the Tampa Bay Rays. The World Series at a neutral site was odd but memorable as we had thrilling and emotional moments. In the end, the team from L.A won the series in six games and lifted its first World champion trophy since 1988. Dodger baseball legends who are now dead like Vin Scully, Tommy Lasorda and Maury Wills got to see their team break its championship drought in a weird and inauthentic way, but it was better than not having a chance to play for a title at all. The Dodgers’ World Series success came two weeks after the Los Angeles Lakers won their bubble championship south of Orlando, Fla over the Miami Heat. SoCal sports teams were doing pretty good during these wild times in the world.

Looking back on it all, the Lakers championship doesn’t feel as real to me. I wonder if that had something to do with them playing thousands of miles away from Southern California in a bubble. Or maybe it was tainted due to the roster of the team considering quitting their bubble run due to “racial violence” occurring in the outside world. Part of the reason for why the NBA opted to return to play was so that the players could make their voices heard in a time when there were quite a few major African-American police brutality incidents that resulted in death or serious injury occurring. The players became more comfortable with being activists in their own bubble and displaying their message to millions of people watching at home. They didn’t care if they alienated some portion of their fan bases. They wanted to be on the “right side of history”. Continuing what was boldly started by Colin Kaepernick in 2016, the NBA and NFL players along with soccer players across the world took a knee for George Perry Floyd, who died in a perceived police brutality incident that was documented on almost every major news network and social media platform. What nobody cared to wonder about was why the police officers in Minneapolis were called to detain Floyd. The perceptive image was all that mattered and the only thing that still matters to those people who are unwilling to see or hear the full truth of that incident. Clearly as the old phrase goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. That’s up to the horse to do in the end.

Having phrases on the back of jerseys such as “Black Lives Matter”, “Choose Love” and “It Takes All Of Us” in the bubble was a clear example of political pandering to the social justice issue of that time period. Even people who would say “All Lives Matter” were blacklisted and even fired from their jobs due to a lack to acknowledge the lived reality of darker-skinned people in a so-called “police brutality state”. A line had been crossed and the NBA unfortunately can never go back to the way things were. Neither can the NFL, whose players forced commissioner Roger Goodell to say that the NFL was wrong to discriminate against Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee during our National Anthem to protest police brutality in America. The news media was on the side of the players and thus a social justice serum has been seared into the league’s identity ever since. With the mandatory playing of “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing” at games where very little fans attended in 2020 and the players similarly feeling comfortable to take a knee on occasion due to a lack of disapproving fans in the stands occurring, the NFL had crossed the divide between avoiding social justice issues and fully embracing them. This clearly came at a time when the politics of the nation were becoming increasingly divisive and the people usually escape to sports so that they don’t have to deal with all the icky stuff that occurs off the field. But in taking a statement of a Fox News commentator to heart, the majority of players, including most African-American ones, simply would not “shut up and dribble”. It was their decision to stage a politicized protest during the Star Spangled Banner and it is to the ruin of their sports leagues’ brands in the end. The leagues who simply don’t inject this nonsensical activism into their leagues will be the ones that endure until the end. Apparently no league got that memo in 2020, but they sure received it later on. No one has knelt for the anthem since because their point was made and legislation has been passed to hold police officers accountable for their actions if they do anything illegal. It’s ironic that body cameras on officers were meant to show how “racist” and mean these cops were, but it had the opposite effect. It showed the entire nation what these cops were dealing with as first responders and enforcers of the law. They are normal folks like the rest of us who put their lives on the line to protect our communities from criminals and bad people. Any defunding of their departments would be unwise, but the sentiment in 2020 has stuck around in some pockets of the nation.

The travesties that happened in 2020 were undeniably bitter and was more tragic for the children who had to live through this messy era of being unable to play with their friends outside for fear of spreading the virus(even if there was no trace of it within any of their families). It was bad that these kids couldn’t play their favorite sport recreationally or competitively and because of that, they became more vulnerable to online exposure and what a high amount of time spent on a smartphone or in front of a television or a computer would do to their brains was not even remotely considered when some jurisdictions decided to enforce quarantine measures longer than they needed to. Much longer. It’s probably the greatest misfortune of all that the people who claimed to care about the health of everyone involved didn’t even take into account that children were very unlikely to die of the virus if they even contracted it. Sure, there are some cases of kids who get COVID and they have underlying health conditions that led them to pass away from it. But those cases are super rare in a nation filled with some of the best healthcare tools in the world. However, the education of kids was pushed online and thus in-person interaction with their peers was maximally minimized. There were some states that opened up their schools at the beginning of the new school year in Aug 2020, but there were others who stayed shut down for the entire school year. Thus, participation in sport was restricted and prohibited in some locations. Organized sporting events could not happen to give these kids a sense of purpose. Their only purpose seemed to exist online. With their classes for school. With their recreational activities in playing games and interacting with their friends. With watching their favorite TV shows and movies. But here’s the one thing that made it false. It just felt inauthentic. No face-to-face talking with buddies. No chances to make new friends and form new connections that could last a lifetime. No interacting face-to-face without wearing a mask(it depended on how much their parents took community health directives seriously). The state of Wisconsin was so brain-dead that they forced their kids to wear masks… on Zoom class calls. What was the point of that? To make it feel like they were meeting in-person. You can’t contract a virus if you’re socially distanced and on a computer. That was completely pointless. Imagine living in that dystopia in a politically neutral state(they voted for the Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election). All of this is something that should remain buried in the past and never resurrected again. But what if there is a health crisis that turns out to be worse than COVID and people don’t take the directives from health experts seriously because they remember the sense of betrayal that they felt from them due to the coronavirus nonsense? That will be an even-greater tragedy that was caused due to the incompetence and hubris in the hearts and heads of these so-called experts.

So, six years after this nonsensical period began, what have we learned as a society? We have learned not to put our trust fully in “experts” and the recommendations that they make. Everyone has a different health situation and a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t work. In fact, it never does. Look at what they tried to do in forcing a vaccine on us that was barely tested in lab trials; they basically used our emotional desire to be free of the chains of quarantine against us. And anyone who didn’t comply was branded an “anti-vaxxer” and anti-science. And thus anti-life. So, the people are against the health experts unless they are desperate to receive those booster shots of the vaccine. They thought the vaccine could protect them from Covid. They were wrong. The vaccine could not do that on its own. Only with a combination of natural immunity from overcoming a bout with the virus could the vaccine actually provide the protection that the experts claimed it could provide. Plus, some folks who took the vax probably suffered more than they would have from the virus. Young healthy men didn’t need the vaccine, but were coerced to take it due to greedy corporations enforcing vaccine mandates that did nothing but drive up vitriol and provided literally no protection against the virus. In fact, it was exclusionary and anti-free choice. In a nation like the United States of America, that is an unforgivable and unforgettable sin. Too many people will remember which party was on the side of the vaccine mandates and that party should suffer the political consequences for a very long time. Exactly what’s happening in the present time.

Another thing we learned is that putting our trust in institutions in the world is very misguided. It is sad to think that hospitals with Christian names and roots in them were not allowing any visitors into their hospital spaces unless they wore a proper face mask and/or took an antibody test that confirmed a negative result for not having the virus. Meaning so many people couldn’t see their loved ones one last time before they died, even if COVID was not the cause of their loved ones’ deaths. And these hospitals deceptively noted down that COVID was the cause of death of the patient, even though it wasn’t in a lot of cases. The only institutions we should put our trust in to guide are ones that guide us closer to the one true God, who guides us and protects us through our own lifetimes if only we are deserving of grace and peace.

It’s insane to think that a basketball court was ground zero for the entire world to be shut down. But it will be remembered in history as a moment that those who lived through it will never forget and one that future generations will read about and say “Golly, I’m sure glad we did not have to live through that”. For those who did live through it, their time on Earth will come to an end eventually and hopefully we can provide good knowledge to the younger generations about what not to do when a health crisis hits their hometown. Don’t panic, it’s not as bad as the media and experts say it is. It either will be overblown or it will be way worse. It all depends on who you are and how you react to a chaotic situation that happens in this green and blue world that we are lucky to inhabit and call a temporary home.