‘That was PERSONAL’: School switches balloon drop for beach ball drop at graduation, and nearly wipes out the next generation in one go

Let’s get sober for a moment here; the generations that inhabit the “growing up” portions of the human race right now have a pretty rough shake of things ahead.

Rent continues to go to the moon while wages stay at terrestrial levels, you have to pay a premium for nutritious groceries these days, and at this rate, it seems like a matter of time before the winners of the working class are decided by the daily King Of The Hill matches that take place on the charter bus bound for one of the millions of Amazon factories, each of which can only afford to pay so many workers each day.

Indeed, if we didn’t know any better, we’d say that mercy killings might be the best way forward for these bright-eyed champions of tomorrow. Apparently, the University of South Florida thought that, too.

Captured by TikTok‘s @cindycooble, the graduating class of USF is seen all huddled in a stadium, preparing to be sent out into the cruel and unusual conditions of modern society, when the celebratory balloon drop turned out to be substituted with a celebratory beach ball drop. In other words, rather than getting brushed on the head by oxygen-enabled latex whose gravity would allow them to be spread out amongst the class, a small handful of grads were instead ham-fistedly clobbered by an influx of yellow and green plastic that, despite not being heavy by any stretch, was still much more capable of impact than their more seasonally-anarchist cousins.

The question, of course, is as follows: why? What possessed the faculty and organizers of USF’s 2024 graduation ceremony to replace the balloons with beach balls? Surely the latter took much longer to blow up, and it made for a more awkward event by several orders of magnitude. Could it be the case that the school was trying to be just a tad more environmentally friendly this year?

If so, there were far better options at their disposal than beach balls. According to Balloons Blow, eco-friendly alternatives to balloons in a context like this could have ranged from ribbons to tissue paper pompoms to bubbles.

Do you know what all three of those things have in common? A trivial relationship to gravity; one that wouldn’t have resulted in rapid-fire thunk-thunk-thunks upon the select few grads who were chosen to bear the wrath of USF’s collection of beach balls. Would cleanup have been more of a headache? Yeah, probably, but this is a day to celebrate the grads first and foremost, and frankly, whoever chose to go ahead with this beach ball stunt deserves the most tedious cleanup session of their life.