Through These Eyes #4: The College Spirit

     Well, my friends, it is now the end of January. The Christmas season is past. The lights have all been taken off of the houses up on 92nd and Greenfield. Santa no longer hangs out at the local shopping malls, and kids have forgotten about being good for another eleven months. It is time to pay the bills and rest, maybe catch a bowl game or two.

     But the warm glow that comes from the charity we might have displayed keeps us warm through these cold winter months, does it not? We dropped a few dimes and nickels in the kettles of the Salvation Army bell ringers. Maybe dropped off a can of vegetables in the local television station's bin in our local grocery store. Put a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Nuclear Assault Van or something into the Toys for Tots box. Now we are content. We have saved the world.

     So we are content, and we generally forget the poor, the hungry, and the cold for the rest of the year. We have done our part. Everybody is happy, life is good, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.

     The only problem is, that one minor detail that, oh, the poor are still poor. The stomachs of the hungry still rumble in the night. But forget about that. We still have to pay for those Nintendo cartridges we bought our little brother.

     The problem with the Christmas spirit is that it is such a fleeting thing. It starts about mid-November when we remember that some people aren't going to have all that much for Thanksgiving, and it is over by December 26. A short span of time to remember the flaws in society.

     So I was sitting in my room trying to launch myself into some sort of zealous tirade for this column, and I got to thinking of the nature of the college spirit. The Christmas and college spirits are alike in many ways, I hesitate to say.

     For one thing, we listen to funny music and drink a lot. But aside from that, we are at one with the world in a rather blithe sort of benevolence. We run at midnight to give food to the homeless. We do all sorts of things to help those less fortunate than ourselves. We enjoy that warm glow that it is better to give than to receive.

     The one fear that looms before me is that this, like the Christmas spirit, is a once-in-a-lifetime event. That once we reach the end we will go on and pay our bills and forget everything charitable, that we will just remember the warm glow of giving distantly and fondly. Sure, now we are all bright-eyed idealists that want to change the world. That seems to be a part of the college experience or perhaps youth in general.

     Before you arch your backs and start hissing, let me go to the historical record. An extreme example would be the sixties, when the college students routinely got shot in their efforts to better the world. Okay, so maybe they were slightly-glazed-eyed idealists, but the point is, they soon found themselves in the mainstream of society, struggling for themselves in the dog-eat-dog world. If people on that pole of the activist spectrum are that drawn to inactivity after college, I think we might be just as susceptible.

     I know that programs like MUCAP and other acronymed clubs are out there saving the world every day, and right now we are sticking to our guns idealistically, but the question is, will we after they stop presenting themselves at every turn, ringing their bells and getting our attention at every corner? It scares me to think that we might not. Perhaps we will enjoy the other eleven months of our lives with only the memory of our past beneficence. Think about that for a while, and Merry College to you.