Thanksgiving Break starts tomorrow, and for a lot of us it cannot come fast enough. Many of us are leaving Charlottesville today, already drooling over the thought of sleeping in and enjoying home-cooked meals. I certainly count myself among that group of students. For people like me, breaks are a chance to let some responsibility slide — to lay back and enjoy not having always to be somewhere, or do something, at any given time. But for the less responsible among us, breaks are — or are at least seen as — times of greater stress and greater responsibility.
Although I will not be seeing my immediate family in Texas this Thanksgiving, I have fantastic grandparents, aunts and uncles to spend time with over break. Other students are not so lucky. Either circumstances keep them from returning home, or they do get home, but only to spend it nursing sick relatives, listening to parents argue, bickering with siblings and generally ending up more on edge than when they left. I feel for these fellow students.
The students I have a problem with are the ones who wrongly see a good, solid home as added responsibility. These are the students who are treating college like a glorified, multi-thousand-dollar daycare, and there are plenty of them. Going home presents, to these students, a chance for the independence they abuse in college to be curtailed. I know people here at the University who have stumbled in, puked in a clogged toilet, and crashed in someone else’s bed. I know people who have their significant over every other night, leaving their roommate out on the couch on a regular basis without a second thought. At home, you cannot flood the shower and act oblivious when others complain. You cannot leave dirty dishes scattered all over the living room and hope someone else will clean them up. Most families would also frown on you wandering in at three in the morning, drunk and loud and accompanied by a group of strangers.
I am using specific examples, but not all from anyone in particular. These apply to friends, to people I barely know, to strangers I hear my friends complain about. I would wager many students know people like this. I know too many.
Critics will say that college is, among many things, a chance to learn how to live like an independent adult. You do your own laundry, do your own dishes and shop for your own groceries. And, admittedly, this is a learning process. To me, though, that does not excuse behavior that would be unacceptable to many first graders. College is a chance to learn to do by yourself what has always been done for you, not to let those aspects of your life collapse to the detriment of those around you.
If you are like me — responsible and perhaps a little too judgmental — then you have read this column thinking, “Yeah, I know people like that. Wish they’d get their act together.” But if you are the one who is bumbling through college with no real sense of simple, day-to-day responsibilities, if you are the one with the hair in the sink, with someone else’s towel wrapped unabashedly around you, with the dirty dishes on the carpet, then seriously — pull it together.
If you are utilizing college as it was intended, then Thanksgiving Break will be just that — a break. No day-to-day commitments, no lectures or meetings to attend. But if college is your daycare, where you get to indulge in regular sex, binge drinking and general negligence — all at the expense of others — then break is more of a rude interruption. College should be seen by everyone as a chance to make something of oneself, to prepare for the next, harder steps in life, not merely as a chance to suspend responsibility for four years.
Sam Novack’s column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at s.novack@cavalierdaily.com.
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